Free comms advice

Danny Williams has used a clever talking point lately in whining whiningly, and at length, about the content of certain "unsigned editorials" in various daily newspapers.

How dare they, says he, question or contradict me? Don't they know who I am?

Memo to Danny Williams, a very intelligent man who shows, on frequent occasions, the true value of a Rhodes Scholarship: Editorials are always unsigned.

If it's signed, it's not an editorial. It's a column or an op-ed. An editorial, properly called, it is not.

An editorial, you see, is an opinion piece which emanates from the paper. Its "author" is the masthead. (Which explains why "unsigned editorials" annoy the Boss so. It makes it that much harder to figure out who to call up and berate for questioning the Gospel According to St. Dan.)

This rule tends to go out the window with weeklies, campus papers, etc. But for a quality, daily, newspaper, its lack of a signature is one of the defining things that makes an editorial an editorial.

Perhaps one of the many comms assistants — surely, some of them came from the ranks of the wretchedly ink-stained — in the provincial government can explain this, in small words that he can understand, to Glorious™ Rhodes Scholar... if they dare correct, contradict, or gainsay the Great Man™.