Newspaper editorials are meant to be short and authoritative. They represent the views of the editorial board, representing the paper. They can be descriptive and analytical, but the memorable and influential ones tend to be strongly prescriptive. An editorial saying, “Gosh, that climate change, now there’s a problem,” is not going to influence the way most readers already think about that topic. (It might have, though, 15 or 20 years ago).
So we want to be able to say something about every topic we choose. We never say something we don’t believe just to provoke, though. And we have to be able to say it in between 400 and 800 words – 400 is standard length for a Citizen editorial these days.
Two of the topics on the editorial board’s list this morning were what you might call wicked problems: The question of when and how Canada should intervene in foreign conflicts, and the question of how to provide appropriate care for seniors who aren’t sick but need various degrees of help with daily life – many of whom are, like my 93-year-old grandpa, currrently in hospital for no good reason. The somewhat callous term is “bed blockers”, because they spend weeks or months in hospital beds that could be made available for people with acute health-care needs.
So how do we solve problems like collective security and bed blockers in 400-word editorials?
The short answer is, we don’t. We try to find something useful and prescriptive to say, something that will move the conversation forward. Sometimes all we can do is identify the problem, but as I said above, we do try to go beyond that.
The easy way out, I suppose, would be to refuse to editorialize on wicked problems, because they’re too big to be solved in 800 words or fewer. We could stick to binary questions. Is a particular piece of legislation good or bad? Should the Ottawa police force tell people when it’s considering using licence plate scanners or similar technology?
Another wicked problem that’s been in the news is the question of aboriginal rights and welfare, thanks to the Idle No More movement and a few other news stories. This is not something anyone can “solve” in 800 words, but that doesn’t mean we should stop talking about it. I’m glad that most newspapers (including the Citizen) have carried opinion pieces from all kinds of perspectives on this, because I don’t think there is a simple right answer — or even a simple right way of defining what the “problem” is.
