Laura Miller, a former rough-and-tumble newspaper columnist who is now the mayor of Dallas, says in a Wall Street Journal interview:

When I was a journalist, I saw everything as black and white, and I loved throwing hand grenades. As someone who now is targeted, I feel the pain. I have new appreciation for being the hunted as opposed to the hunter

I knew Laura when we worked at the Dallas Observer together. She and I were very different; she was a hard-charging crusader, focused on exposing corruption and other municipal misdeeds. I was more “writerly,” trying less to save the world than to find and tell compelling stories.

And while Laura was a talented reporter, I agree with her self-assessment; she tended to see heroes and villains in every column. I think it’s a problem shared by many journalists — one I became keenly aware of after I, like Laura, left the profession.

Black-and-white creates narrative drama, but is rarely fair to all parties. Many reporters tend to be more sympathetic to the parties they identity with (artists, crusaders, critics, etc.) and less to those they don’t (in particular, anyone who drinks the corporate Kool-Aid.)

Some of my own post-journalism confessions are here.

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