{"id":6308,"date":"2023-05-17T15:00:41","date_gmt":"2023-05-17T20:00:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/chicagoshadydealer.com\/?p=6308"},"modified":"2023-05-16T11:55:38","modified_gmt":"2023-05-16T16:55:38","slug":"op-ed-journalism-means-never-having-to-say-youre-sorry","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/chicagoshadydealer.com\/index.php\/2023\/05\/17\/op-ed-journalism-means-never-having-to-say-youre-sorry\/","title":{"rendered":"Op-Ed: Journalism Means Never Having to Say You\u2019re Sorry"},"content":{"rendered":"

When you\u2019re a world-famous opinion columnist, especially if your opinions are just violently bad, you get a lot of letters from people asking to apologize. What they fail to understand, though, is that I am not a mere opinion columnist. I am a <\/span>journalist<\/span><\/i>. I work for the <\/span>New York Times<\/span><\/i>. And the <\/span>New York Times<\/span><\/i> never corrects itself when it is wrong.<\/span><\/p>\n

I\u2019ve never apologized, which means I\u2019ve never done anything wrong. I\u2019m proud to be your Class Day speaker, and I\u2019ll use my valuable time to do anything but apologize. In fact, everyone should be apologizing <\/span>to me<\/span><\/i>. Professors should apologize for calling me a bedbug on Twitter, even though I tried to get them fired. Waiters should apologize for forcing me to slap them with their subpar service. Anyone who parks in front of my house should apologize for their obvious, flagrant antisemitism.<\/span><\/p>\n

Take Cindy Sheehan, whose son is some dead soldier or something. She called me the other day and called me a \u201cwarmongering horsefly\u201d because I \u201csupported the Iraq War,\u201d and demanded an apology. That was her first mistake. I told her that I was honored to have contributed to the main talking point of her activism career. I made sure to remind her that losing her son was worth all the speaker\u2019s honorariums, and also would she please pay me to speak at the funeral.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Sure, I might have been \u201cinstrumental to the dehumanization of Iraqis\u201d and \u201can accessory to the military industrial complex that killed her child,\u201d but who\u2019s to say I\u2019m <\/span>really<\/span><\/i> at fault? All I did was deliberately whip up an unstoppable national bloodlust for mass casualties. That\u2019s literally the job description of a journalist! And a journalist demands no apologies.<\/span><\/p>\n

I know I\u2019ve done a lot of things in my life that so-called \u201cordinary people\u201d would ask me to atone for.\u00a0 But I chose \u2018pretentious opinion columnist\u2019 as a career, and that means I never have to apologize. I am a journalist, goddammit. Sure, every once in a while I recklessly endanger 654,965 lives. Doesn\u2019t everyone? It says right there in my job description: journalist. Journalists don\u2019t apologize.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I am a journalist, goddammit. Sure, every once in a while I recklessly endanger 654,965 lives. Doesn\u2019t everyone?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":902,"featured_media":6310,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6308","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/chicagoshadydealer.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6308","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/chicagoshadydealer.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/chicagoshadydealer.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chicagoshadydealer.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/902"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chicagoshadydealer.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6308"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/chicagoshadydealer.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6308\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6311,"href":"https:\/\/chicagoshadydealer.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6308\/revisions\/6311"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chicagoshadydealer.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/6310"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/chicagoshadydealer.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6308"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chicagoshadydealer.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6308"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chicagoshadydealer.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6308"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}