Editor & Publisher:
You'd expect Molly Ivins -- syndicated columnist, best-selling author, and veteran eviscerator of the pompous and mendacious -- to freely offer her opinions to a reporter, and she does, even suggesting this lede: "Molly Ivins Still Not Dead."
The third recurrence of the breast cancer she has been battling since 1999 (and which recently claimed her good friend, former Texas Gov. Ann Richards) has left the 62-year-old Ivins with precarious balance, minimal hair, and no illusions about the redemptive quality of life-threatening illness. "I'd hoped to become a better person from confronting my own mortality," she laughs. "But it hasn't happened."
What has happened, and continues to happen, are her two columns a week, syndicated in hundreds of newspapers, wittily skewering Republicans and "Republican-lite" Democrats with her trademark, Texas-size sense of humor, politely referred to as "ribald" in some quarters. (She contends she was fired from The New York Times back in 1982 for, among other things, referring to a community's annual chicken-killing festival as a "gang pluck.") Her passion for newspapers, and the good they can do, remains undiminished. As chair of the Texas Observer board, she's especially intent on helping to keep alive the print media's small, independent voices.
I'd reprint the whole damned thing if I could get away with it ('gang pluck' just killed me). She had great advice for newspaper publishers who, seeing a declining return on investment, make newspapers "smaller and less helpful and less interesting."
"Damn fools, wake up and think."
So go check it out for yourself.
Tags: news | politics | media | newspaper | Texas | Molly Ivins
