The case for vibrant, engaged editorial pages.

'... A continuing duty to contribute to collective life'

If I were asked to launch a were daily newspaper today and, as a first task, to provide a staffing plan, I would reserve a place in the plan for an editorial page editor and editorial writers. Resistance might come from accountants and business managers who, to be sure, have a duty to ask tough questions when money is being spent. An editorial page and its personnel cost money.

Similarly, specialists in circulation, marketing, and sales might object. The space an editorial page would take could be used to promote circulation by connecting readers to more of the excitements of entertainment, sports, and other diversions--or even for more and serious news.

Furthermore, post-modern commentators tied to the Internet and the opportunities it creates might say that the world is awash with opinions and that there is no longer a need to build institutions that add to the number. The principal business of a newspaper is to build a record of news and fact on which citizens-amongst them independent bloggers and columnists-can discuss and comment endlessly. Why add yet another podium?

So there are reasons available to justify disposing of an old practice and bowing to financial, commercial, and technologically created opportunities.

Nevertheless, I would stick to my plan. I would do so firmly and self-confidently in the belief, first, that journalism, considered as both reporting and opinion, occupies a special place in the architecture of a deliberative democracy. Secondly, the authority and value of the opinions it proffers arise out of the institutional responsibility it takes for the news and facts it circulates, with and without bylines. So it is essential to secure a place for authoritative thought, with and without bylines, in the institution that gathers and authorizes the news.

News, as the sociologist Robert Park once said, is a special--he could have said unique--form of knowledge. Historians provide portraits of the past; sociologists and political scientists direct attention to the durable structures of status and power that mark society; journalists in their reports capture fragments of a world in motion. As Walter Lippmann wrote thoughtfully in 1922, news is most likely to occur in the domain in which "people's affairs touch public authority."

So a newspaper in its news pages constructs daily knowledge of a particular kind. If it has an editorial page, it constructs reflections on the knowledge it gathers and in which it specializes.

The editorial reflections, as much as the reports, are expressions of the freedom a newspaper enjoys. But, more profoundly, they are expressions of a continuing duty to contribute to collective life. Editorial writing--at least the editorial writing I have in mind--should structure and clarify experience and move forward the discussion of public facts from the front lines of reality. Editorial writing aids and abets the process of illumination and promotes rational thinking in the public sphere.

John Stuart Mill had something like this in mind in his remarkable essay "On Liberty" He said--I provide the full quotation to introduce the nugget at the end--that "it is owing to a quality of the human mind, the source of everything respectable in man either as an intellectual or as a moral being, namely, that his errors are corrigible. He is capable of rectifying his mistakes, by discussion and experience. Not by experience alone. There must be discussion, to show how experience is to be interpreted."

So the case for the editorial page rests on a belief not only that reflections should be written, but that they should be written on the site where news is gathered and authorized. Insofar as they reflect the news, their general authority will be mainly greater than opinion written from sites one or two steps removed.

The late Norman Cousins must have had a parallel thought in mind when he said of the old Saturday Review that it was "an essay in the present tense." His notion encourages us to construct thoughtful meditations on the here and now that clarify, illuminate, point the way, enlighten--that, in short, start the process of public reflection on the random facts that mark the news. It is a step in the democratic process, and it is a solemn duty of serious newspapers.

G. Stuart Adam once wrote editorials for the defunct Ottawa Journal. He is currently journalism scholarship fellow at the Poynter Institute and professor emeritus of journalism at Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada. Email: [e-mail]