Cole sticks around for 'candid' audience

I caught word of a post a couple weeks ago on the social media site BlueSky in which a person wrote: “…Althea Cole has been fired by The Gazette. God is good.”

I've got good news and bad news for that person.

The good news is that God is indeed good.

The bad news – in the eyes of my fans on BlueSky, at least – is that I wasn’t exactly fired.

In fact, saying as much got me a bit of a scolding when I joked about it shortly after it was announced that The Gazette was to be sold to a new parent company.

“You’re not being fired, you’re being laid off!” my colleague insisted as we grabbed lunch to decompress after the morning’s events.

Fair enough. I can’t say I was fired. But I can confirm that my position as Content Editor and Columnist for the opinion page was one of several positions that Adams Multimedia, the new parent company of The Gazette, chose not to retain.

Let’s tackle the issue that several readers of my column have already implied: No, I wasn’t pushed out because of my right-leaning political perspective. Not at all.

If anything, being a rare conservative in the newspaper business has only widened my appeal in the print journalism industry, because … well, there are so few of us.

There was no sinister plot to oust the only conservative newspaper writer left in the state of Iowa.

There were plenty of demands over the years for my termination, sure. My boss never told me how many of those he fielded during any given week. Perhaps he was afraid that I would treat it as a number to top. (I probably would have.)

And I definitely wasn’t driven out by the “liberal Todd Dorman,” to put a Trump-esque descriptor on it.

If you picture The Gazette’s most liberal writer constantly clashing with The Gazette’s (only) conservative writer, I’m about to burst your bubble – I had a supportive editor who gave me terrific latitude to write about the things I found interesting and relevant.

“It’s a nice contrast to my liberal screed,” he told me in his typical self-deprecating wit during my first week on staff at The Gazette.

It was a good working relationship, and I’m sorry our arrangement as page editor and editor-lite had to come to an end.

On that note, I have more bad news.

At least, it’s probably bad news if you’ve already celebrated the demise of The Gazette’s conservative columnist. I have signed an agreement to continue writing for The Gazette as a freelance opinion contributor.

The changes are mostly behind the scenes. Instead of being on staff at The Gazette, I am now self-employed and will provide written pieces on contract. My editing role is no more. My desk at The Gazette’s downtown office is cleaned out; my nametag bearing the company logo now serves only as a memento.

My column itself, as it happens, will likely remain the same, complete with an email at the bottom so readers can continue to send their reactions.

People can even still demand my ouster just like they did before – even though I think we’ve established by now that The Gazette does not seem willing to cut ties with its writers over politics.

I do feel guilty for what seems more like turning a page in my career when other hardworking Gazette staff are seeing their books shut entirely. I suspect it helps that my role was always part-time – smaller voids are apparently easier to fill. But I certainly wish the circumstances were different.

I owe a debt of gratitude to Gazette readers for consuming the product I have created, and to The Gazette for finding a mutually beneficial way for me to keep creating it.

Creating that product has meant exploring some complicated issues over the last several years, and from a perspective different than any other newspaper writer in Iowa. My work over the last four and a half years has involved things such as pushing back on COVID-19 hysteria, getting deep in the weeds about public education reform and arguing against so-called transgender inclusion policies that defy common sense (and appropriate medical standards).

And that’s just to name just a few.

Sure, my columns on those topics and others have gotten some backlash. There have been angry emails, lots of rude comments on social media and nasty voicemails. Getting booed at public events is no picnic. At the same time, all of it reminds me to never take myself too seriously.

Others have had more productive things to say about my having waded into those complicated issues. I got calls from area education agency employees and school district administrators who felt they had to keep quiet about inefficiencies and wasteful spending by their employers. I got emails from Iowa parents who had supported their child’s gender transition only to realize they’d made a mistake, and from teachers and school leaders who feared backlash if they were to raise an objection to the COVID mask mandates that were disrupting learning.

Most of those people weren’t on the same political wavelength as your friendly neighborhood conservative columnist. They reached out because they were shocked that someone was willing to plainly articulate a perspective they did not think was welcome in print media, let alone one with some thought behind it. They reached out because they wanted me to know that it mattered.

That’s been one of the most gratifying things about writing this column: finding out that there are still people who are willing to consider complicated issues in good faith. It’s why I chose the title that I did for this column: “To a Candid World.”

One reader whose emails were always stacked with insults repeatedly gave me a hard time about it, as if it were nothing more than a self-adulating nod to my own audacity.

It was never about my own candor. The reader probably didn’t recognize the phrase — it’s from the Declaration of Independence, wherein the signers teed up their grievances against King George III by saying, “To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world.”

The term “candid world,” according to Stephen E. Lucas, author of “The Stylistic Artistry of the Declaration of Independence,” refers to “readers who are free from bias or malice, who are fair, impartial, and just.”

In other words, “to a candid world” refers to those who are actually willing to consider the words shared with them.

Many of you have done just that. And it has been a tremendous privilege to share my words and thoughts with you — one that appears to have not yet concluded.

With that said, it's nice to be back writing for The Gazette. It's almost like I wasn’t actually gone.

Althea Cole is a Gazette opinion contributor. Comments: althea.cole.writer@gmail.com