‘Voices grapple with life’: The role of the editorial writer

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Seldom in a career does an editorial writer confront a topic of greater enormity or historical significance than the terrorist attacks against the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

Yet confront those writers must, and confront they have, because that is their reason for being.

Some may question whether such rare, momentous and horrific incidents require of editorial writers some special consideration, some unique sensibility, some obligation to impose a measure of guarded caution in assessing the events. The short answer is no.

After all, the mission of the editorial writer is to witness the human condition and to evaluate its horrors and joys, its pathos and comedy, its reasonableness and outrages, its brilliance and bafflement, its inspirations and mysteries, and to render that evaluation as passionately or as plaintively, as angrily or as poetically as the writer's heart and gut dictate.

At their best, editorial voices articulate the values and ideals of their respective institutions. Those voices grapple with life, seeking to fathom, explain and render judgment about what it means. Consequently, the voices will not resonate in unanimity, nor should they be expected to, certainly not in a pluralistic society.

In the wake of the recent tragedy, editorial writers throughout the United States, and the world, drew on both their knowledge and their emotions to form their words. They may have argued different points; some may have relied on the cool discipline of logic as others sought to exhort readers with the deft, emotive turn of phrase; their conclusions and prescriptions may have varied widely.

They struggled, as the light of reason guided them, to arrive honestly in their minds, hearts and souls at some defensible, uncompromised encounter with the truth.

Accomplishing that mission may be harder some days than others, especially those few days after Sept. 11, but that's what the job requires. Pulled punches or other measures of guarded caution do the readers no favors.

Tommy Denton is editorial page editor of the Roanoke (VA) Times and a past president of the National Conference of Editorial Writers.