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On the politics of commemoration.
Casting my eye over The Washington Post's obituary page the other day, I came across this rather striking opening paragraph:
William Ringle, a chief Washington correspondent for Gannett News Service who nimbly covered foreign policy and national affairs and who was known for taking a dim view of opinion writing, died Sept. 5 at a retirement home in Davidson, NC. He was 88.
Odd, that. Imagine being a journalist of some distinction and having it put in the lead paragraph of your obituary that what you were "known for"-what, in a sense, your life amounted to and thus why you are afforded an obituary in one of the nation's leading newspapers-was (a) your (presumably) figurative nimbleness and (b) your dim view of opinion writing. We can guess what the author, Adam Bernstein, was getting at. It was another if not very elegant way of saying that Mr. Ringle had outlived the journalistic conventions and customs under which he had distinguished himself in that trade. He was, in short, a dinosaur-which is journalese for an extinct species. That, in turn, is journalistic hyperbole for someone whom time and fashion have in some degree stranded in the past. Such people appear, like dinosaurs to the age of mammals, frightening, bizarre, or quaint, and there is a little of each, I fancy, in the dim view taken by today's journalists of someone from a preceding generation who once took a dim view of opinion writing. How could it be otherwise when all journalism has become, if not itself opinion writing, focused and directed by opinion?
Maybe it was always that way. After his dim view of opinion writing, the obituary tells us, Mr. Ringle's lesser-known accomplishments included, "a reputation for pivoting deftly from coverage of major world events to stories that were of a decidedly local angle for the smallest of Gannett's papers."
When he retired in 1988, Mr. Ringle was saluted by the company's news chief, John Quinn: "Only Bill Ringle, on a visit to Lebanon in 1970, would have filed stories about an acting ambassador from Rochester, a drug suspect from Niagara Falls and an American drug agent from Hartford. And only Bill, dispatched to cover the Reagan-Gorbachev summit in Moscow...