That was the catchphrase last night of Ellen Goodman, one of the first female newspaper columnists to be both an unabashed feminist and syndicated nationwide. Madhu and I are here in Cambridge, Mass. at the Women, Action, Media! Conference sponsored by the Center for New Words, which used to be a feminist bookstore, but became a non-profit devoted to strengthening women’s voices in the media after the indie shop found it could no longer compete with the big chains.

Goodman, in her sixties, was less than fluent on topics such as race (she had a tendency to talk about “women” as one category, unaffected in their career opportunities by barriers of race or class) and the blogosphere (she seemed unaware of the middle ground between straight political blogging and “mommy blogging”), but her perspective from so many decades in journalism was invaluable. Op-ed writing should tell people what the news means, she said, less that it should tell people what to think. In other words, the best columnists give context. But in today’s opinion journalism landscape, Goodman said, “everyone is now required to be so incredibly certain” about every issue, instead of teasing out complexities and admitting they don’t always have the answers. I think it’s pretty clear that this kind of over-confidence contributed to the media’s war drum beating in 2002 and 2003, and the rash of mea culpas in the years since. But sadly, I don’t see the landscape changing very much. It’s still de rigueur to take an extreme position just for the fun of defending it, and not because it’s correct.