Abstract

The I's Have It

A painstaking review of columns by the major Op-Ed and political columnists of The New York Times and The Washington Post has revealed who among the columnists of various newspapers most often refer to themselves in their columns. To establish the Op-Ego Index, the calculations were simple. The time frame covered a year, beginning in the summer of 1992. Each columnist's use of a singular or plural self-reference-"I," "me," "myself," "we," "us," "ourselves"--was tallied, and the annual total was divided by the number of columns written. There is an over-use of "I think" and "I believe"--phrases that are mostly pointless but serve to introduce the writer into the text. Under the crude mechanisms used to compile this Op-Ego Index, appropriate first-person mentions could not be distilled from the needless ones. But anecdotal evidence strongly suggests that the practice is rarely engaged in for noble motives. The results of the review show that Post's Richard Cohen is the Michael Jordan of self-referential punditry. No one comes near his average of 13.4 ego-mentions per column. The next three spots were also captured by Post writers, with Meg Greenfield (8.4) and William Raspberry (6.2) placing and showing.