Philip Terzian: The Art of Opinion
By Joan Niesen
For Philip Terzian, there’s so much more to journalism than simply piecing together cold, hard facts. Reclining in his chair behind a desk scattered with baubles and mementos, Terzian furrows his brow, unsure whether to move a sentence or change a word. As an editor, he’s a bit of a perfectionist; he strives to fine-tune each piece that comes across his desk, looking for both informative content and, more importantly, creative, clear language. Whether he’s penning his own opinion pieces in a syndicated column or examining the articles that his staff submit to him, Terzian is mindful of the tone of every story, tweaking seemingly minor details in order to unify and strengthen the writing.
For the past three years, Terzian has been the Books & Arts Editor of The Weekly Standard, a conservative political magazine based in Washington, D.C. In this position, he is in charge of the “back of the book” and edits the magazine’s pieces about culture, literature, history, music, and other artistic endeavors. He also dabbles in political opinion writing, the genre upon which he built his career.
A Washingtonian through and through, Terzian’s lifelong love of politics has both inspired and guided his work. Born in 1950 in Kensington, Md., Terzian has spent all but 13 years of his life in the Washington, D.C. area. His politically conscious family read the newspaper at breakfast and debated politics at the dinner table. By the time he was 12 years old, he’d decided that he wanted to become a writer.
As an undergraduate at Villanova University, Terzian joined the school’s newspaper. It was there that he began to build a reputation as a freelance journalist, selling stories to the Philadelphia Evening Bulletin and other area newspapers.
While at Villanova, Terzian also interned for the Democratic National Committee. As a DNC intern, Terzian began writing speeches and took the fall 1970 semester off from college to serve as the official speechwriter for the chairman of the DNC.
After returning to campus and graduating with a degree in English, Terzian briefly studied history at Oxford University before deciding to pursue his journalism career. His first full-time job in journalism was as a desk editor and reporter at Reuters. From there, he went to U.S. News & World Report, and these two jobs, which involved more reporting than interpreting and opinion, solidified his desire to become a columnist.
From 1974 to 1978, Terzian served as the assistant editor of The New Republic, where he met his wife, Grace. Though he enjoyed his position at The New Republic, Terzian decided in 1978 that it was time to leave Washington and see the country. After serving as the speechwriter for Secretary of State Cyril Vance from 1978-1979, Terzian moved to Alabama to write for The Anniston Star. From there he went to The Lexington Herald, The Los Angeles Times, and The Providence Journal. All the while, he also penned a syndicated column and freelanced for The Wall Street Journal, The American Spectator, and The New York Times Literary Supplement, among others. He was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in commentary in 1991 and has since served as a Pulitzer judge.
In 1992, weary of New England winters and nostalgic for the politics and excitement of the capital city, Terzian decided that it was time to return home and convinced his boss at the Providence Journal to allow him to move to the paper’s Washington Bureau. Then, in 2005, The Weekly Standard offered him a position that he couldn’t refuse: that of Books & Arts editor.
Bent over his work in an office whose haphazard decorations are a testament to his varied interests and experiences, Philip Terzian has made The Weekly Standard his home over the past three years. When he took the job, Terzian saw the move as a much-needed change of pace; surrounded by maps, books, and pictures of his wife and two children (Hillman, 23 and Gracie, 17), he has found his stride in the magazine’s offices on 17th Street in the District of Columbia, where he hopes to remain for the rest of his career.
Articles by Philip Terzian:
“A Charm Brigade Raids Washington” – September 11, 2008 book review of Jennet Conant’s book, The Irregulars in The Wall Street Journal
“Capitalism’s Extinction Events” – October 6, 2008 article in The Weekly Standard
“Radio Free America” – August 6, 2007 article in The Weekly Standard
“A New Page in an Old Book” – October 16, 2006 article in The Weekly Standard
“The Fairness Option” – April 25, 2005 article in The Weekly Standard
“Hendrik Horatio Hornblower” – November 3, 2004 book review of Hendrik Hertzberg’s book, Politics: Observations & Arguments in The American Spectator
“’Chicagoland’ Chronicler” – October 1997 book review of Richard Norton Smith’s book, The Colonel: The Life & Legend of Robert B. McCormick, 1880-1955 in The New Criterion
“Don’t Know Much about Much” – August 26, 2004 article in The Wall Street Journal
Terzian discusses his craft in the following Question and Answer.
Q: What writers and editors have inspired you throughout your career?
A: Among journalists, I would say that Malcolm Muggeridge, the British journalist who lived from 1903-1990, was a great favorite of mine. He was a writer and broadcaster. I didn’t agree with everything he said. He wrote a wonderful autobiography, which he never finished. But I always recommend the first volume of it to anyone who thinks that journalism might be right for him. He meant a lot to me.
There were a number of American columnists whom I liked, also; they were obvious names, like Walter Lippman, Joseph Alsop. I thought they were all quite fascinating, and I very much envied what they were doing. Stylistically, though, I would say that Muggeridge was really my model.
Q: Did your bosses and superiors ever influence your work?
A: I had a lot of bosses in my early days whom I liked a lot and who were nice to me, but they didn’t really have much affect on my development. They’d give me a little advice, but it’s kind of a “sink-or-swim” occupation. Editors don’t spend a lot of time counseling you on what you ought or ought not to be doing. You’ve either got it or you don’t.
Q: You’ve been a journalist for such a long time. Has it become easier?
A: If you do this long enough, you can do some writing with one hand tied behind your back. Especially news writing. But I’ve always found reporting to be mild drudgery.
Q: What are your main duties at The Weekly Standard?
A: Well, I’m the literary editor. The magazine is divided into two sections: the front, which is more news, politics, foreign policy; and the back, which is sort of a books and arts section. We in the back have book reviews, art reviews, museum exhibit reviews.
I also read all the galleys of everything that goes in the magazine, and I write a lot of the parody. We have a section called the Scrapbook in the beginning of the magazine, which is just disconnected little items, and I do a lot of that stuff. I will occasionally do short pieces in the front of the magazine about politics, but the back is really my domain.
Q: What is the main difference between being an editor and a writer?
A: If you’re an editor, you’re theoretically not a writer. I like to keep my hand in writing. I wrote my column for twenty years, and after doing it twice a week for that long, you get the feeling that you’re kind of repeating yourself. I wouldn’t say that I had reached that point, and I think I could have gone on indefinitely writing my column, but I felt as if I was a little weary of the process. I welcomed the relief from the volume of writing that I had to do.
Q: Do you have a style or a persona as an editor?
A: I don’t really know how I compare to other editors. I’m not a heavy-handed editor. There are a lot of editors who send things back to writers three or four times, and take the first third and stick it in the middle and take the last sentence and put it at the beginning. I’m not like that; I do that less than most editors. What I tend to do is tinker with the piece to try to give it the tone of our magazine. I very rarely have writers redo things; I would rather tinker with it myself. It’s a lot easier; and ninety-nine times out of a hundred they accept what I’ve done.
Q: As an editor, do you feel more responsibility for the magazine as a whole?
A: I worry about the quality of the product. It’s kind of an obsessive-compulsive desire, I suppose, but I really like to have it just so. I’m not a nut about how many pica- inches are between the headline and the text. Some editors are; I’m not so much. I’m not that interested in graphic excitement; I’d rather have type than pictures. But I do worry very much about the overall tone and quality of the pieces, and that’s my responsibility. I enjoy doing it and it’s fun, especially since I feel like there’s a voice, an editorial style that I can impose.
Q: You seem to be very concerned with style and tone.
A: I think that even writing newspaper columns is a literary enterprise. I’m very concerned with the language and the elegance of the prose. I’m actually sort of shocked by the sort of sloppy prose of some writers. They have this casual style, and they just express themselves in ways that I don’t think are very impressive, from a literary standpoint. But that’s my nuttiness, I know.
Q: How cognizant are you of your audience when you’re writing?
A: You kind of gauge your style and level of erudition to your market. When I’m writing a column for a newspaper, I always remember that newspapers are being read by all kinds of people, from the trash man to the Ph.D., and so you can’t really cater to one. Obviously, you want to write simply and coherently and understandably. I always assume, also, that people who read editorial pages have a certain level of sophistication, so I never felt that I had to over-explain.
Q: Do you think that papers do over-explain at times?
A: A lot of newspapers treat their readers like children. They act like [the readers] don’t know who the last president was. But, within reason, I assume that my readers know a certain amount.
Q: How do you address bias? When is there “too much” opinion?
A: You can’t complain about the bias of an editorial page; it’s supposed to be biased. Columnists aren’t supposed to address both sides of the question. They are paid to express their opinions.
You raise an interesting question that’s sort of an eternal question. I am enough of an American that I think that newspapers should have news sections that are objective and that avoid blatant bias. I know what journalists are thinking when I’m reading what they say; it comes through. It’s very easy to tell, when words come spilling out of the page, what the author’s opinions are.
When I was in the newspaper business, I always felt that we had an educational responsibility that I took seriously. Our readers deserved to be informed about certain things, and it was our job to educate them. After that, you can tell readers, “Now that you know the facts, this is what we think.” That’s always the ideal in news writing, but an awful lot of news organizations martial their facts in order to emphasize their opinions, which I think can be very dangerous.
Q: How have your political views and opinions affected your career?
A: My political views have been influential, although not always decisive, in my thinking and writing, especially since most of my career has been spent contending with ideas and the meaning of events rather than the events themselves. My purpose as a journalist has usually been to interpret the news rather than influence events, and so my political instincts and attitudes have played a significant role.
These views have guided my career only in the sense that, after a certain time, I tended to seek work where my views would be given some latitude. I always preferred expressing my opinion over chronicling what other people were doing and saying. Of course, as a conservative of sorts, this limited my opportunities to a significant degree and, in some instances, required me to function as a lone conservative on an editorial staff or see my opportunities vanish because of my beliefs.
Q: What about here at The Weekly Standard? How political is your writing and where do your views come in?
A: In my present position, politics plays some role, but in “culture” writing, politics tends to take a back seat to temperament, instinct, taste, and other considerations which may or may not coincide with one’s political views.
Q: Do you think the election this year has changed media bias in any way or exacerbated it?
A: We’ve been shocked here at The Standard by Newsweek this past year, which has just become totally partisan and biased in its coverage of the campaign. Well, I’ve often wondered if maybe the ultimate solution is to have a kind of European system where the “Times” is the left-wing paper, the “Post” is the right-wing paper, and the “such and such” is the labor paper. That way, you know going in that something is a left-wing or right-wing paper. Maybe that’s a more honest way of doing it. I’ve worked at every kind of publication in every corner of the country; there’s just no question that there’s always been significant political bias in journalism.
Q: Do you think that the public has any idea of how news publications function?
A: The public really doesn’t know how news publications work. Journalists presume that the average person on the street knows how a newspaper works, and they really don’t. Even highly educated people haven’t the foggiest ideas; there’s really no reason why they should.
Q: How do you go about your freelance work? Do papers contact you with stories, or do you come up with ideas and market them to publications?
A: At this point in my life, they come to me. For many years, the Wall Street Journal has regarded me as its expert on odd things, like the Episcopal Church. They’ve often had me write their features about Washington as a city. The editor knows I grew up here, so I usually get book reviews about the history of Washington. I feel like I get typecast for things like that. I do a lot of reviews of modern history books – modern being twentieth century – and some European and British things. I don’t write a lot about fiction or imaginative literature.
Q: You mentioned being “typecast.” Is that common in journalism?
A: I think so. Even as an editor, when a book comes out, and I need someone to review it, I obviously think of someone who’s written about that kind of stuff before. People are very hesitant to write about things that they aren’t really credentialed experts about, which is silly. You don’t have to be an expert in the field to evaluate something.
Q: When you’re doing reviews and columns, how much research is involved?
It depends. One of the reasons I was attracted to journalism was that, among my many mental quirks, I’ve always had a curious ability to remember dates, names, and events, which is useful around here. I can remember who was Thomas E. Dewey’s running mate in 1944, and things like that. That’s a natural advantage to someone in my business because it cuts down on your research.
Of course, there is Google, which makes everything a lot easier. In the old days, research was a lot harder. So it really depends how much research I do. I don’t know a great deal about economics, so if I were to write a column about that I’d do more research to get reminded of things. The Internet really has been immensely helpful. I often will have read something five years ago, and it’s much easier now to retrieve and find that than it was then.
Q: With such a great memory, you must never be at a loss for ideas for columns.
A: When you’re a journalist, especially when you’re an opinion writer, you’re always living in a world of ideas, and things happen and you file them away in your brain. Then, lo and behold, two years later something happens and you realize that it’s the perfect occasion to use your past experience as an illustration. For someone who’s burdened with the strange autodidact brain that I have, journalism is a great way to make a living, because you can actually make use of all that useless information.
Q: How do you know you are finished when you’re writing an opinion piece?
A: It’s hard. Often, you have many things that you want to say, and you have to boil it down to 800 words. As a consequence, sometimes you can’t get everything in that you want to say; there just isn’t room. I think it’s a good thing, on the whole, because journalists can just go on forever. Shortening and containing is a discipline; it concentrates your mind and you martial what you want to say much more efficiently.
I know my word and space limit, and I tailor my writing to that.
Q: How do you do revisions?
A: I go back once and reread it. I’m not a big re-writer. I don’t have the patience. Once I’ve written something, I don’t want to deal with it again; I’ve had it. I mean I re-read it just to make sure everything makes sense and that I haven’t misspelled words. I’ve never done a second draft of anything in my life, which is why I’m a daily journalist.
Q: Has the Internet really changed the way you do things in your job?
A: The Internet is wonderful. Google is very helpful; you can retrieve quotations and stories instantly. Obviously you have to be careful about your sources, since not everything on the Internet is true and there are inaccuracies, but it makes things so much easier.
Q: Blogs seem to have come hand-in-hand with the Internet. How do you feel about their role in the world of journalism?
A: I’m not a big blogger. I think they’re sort of the “pool hall” of our generation; people waste a whole lot of time there to no good end. There is no original material on blogs. It’s mostly just opinions and snarkiness and oneupsmanship. I still read the paper everyday instead of calling up blogs.
I will occasionally write three sentences on our blog here when Bill Kristol begs me to. If I were someone whose writings were entirely composed of blog posts, I’d be very depressed. It’s kind of like spitting into the wind. But I feel like when you write something and it’s in a publication, there’s a certain solidity, stature, and substance to it. It’s much more artfully presented.
Q: Do you think newspapers are a dying form of journalism?
A: I’m actually sanguine about the future of newspapers. I think there will be a change, especially in the audience. I think there’s going to be a much more elite audience that reads newspapers. It’s going to be smaller. However, newspapers will still be able to attract advertisers.
Some of the things that newspapers used to do are going to be done by TV and the Internet, but some people will always like to be able to cut things out of newspapers. There are those people who like to lie in the bathtub and read the newspaper. There are limitations to reading on the Internet, so I don’t think it’s the end. Newspapers are obviously in transition, but I think there’s a future.
(Interviewed, condensed and edited by Joan Niesen)
