For nearly 25 years, I’ve had one foot in medicine as a pathologist and the other in the political arena. Over that time, I’ve written commentary on everything from corporate insurance cartels taking over medicine to the federal bureaucracy blocking lifesaving cancer blood tests.
Every single time I hit “send” on a new draft, a cynical voice in my head asks the exact same questions: Will the editor accept this, as they’re overwhelmed with tons of these a day? And even if they do, is anyone actually reading this?
We live in a world of 15-second TikTok clips, algorithmic echo chambers, and petty social media yelling matches. It is easy to feel like the traditional opinion piece is a dinosaur. You spend hours trying to map out why Washington is caught in a policy trap. Then you wonder if your words just vanish into the digital void.
But people do read them. They read them religiously. The legacy media outlets cutting back on opinion sections to save a buck are completely blind to how public opinion actually moves.
Changing the minds of ordinary citizens
If you want to know what an opinion essay actually accomplishes, look at the landmark peer-reviewed research out of Yale University. The researchers ran randomized experiments testing how real people respond to published commentary. What they discovered completely flips the script on modern media cynicism.
The study looked at how these pieces land with two distinct groups. They tested political insiders — such as journalists, think-tank scholars, and congressional staffers — against the general public. While both groups were convinced by the essays, the general public was actually more persuaded than the insiders. Regular folks reading the news want clear, logical arguments. They respond to them.
Before reading the op-eds in the study, baseline agreement on the issues sat at 50%. Immediately after ordinary people read a single, well-reasoned piece of commentary, agreement skyrocketed to between 65% and 70%. That is a massive 15-to-20-point leap in public sentiment from just a few paragraphs of text.
This data also destroys the idea of the unbreakable tribal echo chamber. We are told that Americans are hopelessly divided. Yet Yale found that Democrats, Republicans, and independents were all persuaded at almost identical magnitudes. A good argument cuts straight across party lines because ordinary readers value logic over raw tribalism. That impact sticks around, too. The study showed that the shift in a reader’s perspective remained substantial 10 days later. The effect held steady for a full month.
When you write an essay, you are not shouting into an empty canyon. You are fundamentally reshaping how everyday citizens understand complex issues. That new understanding stays with them.
Who is reading?
Because regular people are so deeply affected, the total audience for a solid commentary piece expands into a powerful network. On one side, you have the highly engaged public. These are your local organizers, town council members, and active voters who look at the New York Times guest essays or the Wall Street Journal. They want depth, not soundbites. They take your arguments, print them out, share them, and use them at town halls.
On the other side, you have the decision-makers. Congressional staffers and agency bureaucrats scan the commentary pages every single morning. They want to see what front-line professionals are arguing. They need the data and frameworks that only a specialist can provide. This creates a massive media feedback loop. Cable news producers, talk radio hosts, and investigative reporters use these pages to find talent. A well-placed essay frequently sparks a secondary wave of national media coverage.
People do not read opinion pieces just to find out what happened. They read them to figure out how to think about what happened. The modern news cycle is an overwhelming firehose of raw data. Readers turn to experts to act as trusted translators. They want someone who can look at a fractured system — the way a pathologist looks at a complex illness — and accurately diagnose the underlying disease. Ordinary people are tired of the screaming matches. They are looking for the blind spots in modern governance.
The media’s great mistake
Despite this proven influence on the public, a troubling trend has emerged. Local and regional newspapers are quietly slaughtering their commentary pages. Editors often view them as an expensive luxury or a magnet for complaints from disgruntled readers.
They are completely wrong. They are missing out on the entire conversation.
By killing their commentary pages, these outlets forfeit their status as the intellectual center of their communities. They abandon the exact type of deeply engaging content that drives digital subscriptions. Organizations such as the OpEd Project have proven that there is a massive hunger from diverse, expert voices wanting to break into public discourse.
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When legacy media slam the door on them, those writers do not stop writing. They take their audiences, their traffic, and their cultural relevance straight to Substack, independent digital trade publications, or niche newsletter networks.
Writing a guest essay is not a vanity project. It is dropping a precise anchor right into the specific stream where policy and public discourse are actively being shaped. It is the single most cost-effective tool we have for changing an ordinary citizen’s mind. If old-guard media outlets refuse to provide the space, the conversation will simply move somewhere else.
Dr. Eric Wargotz is a Maryland-based physician, jurist, and civic leader whose career spans more than three decades at the intersection of medicine, law, and public policy. A practicing pathologist and Clinical Professor Emeritus at the George Washington University School of Medicine, he serves as a judge on the Orphans’ Court of Queen Anne’s County, Maryland Juduciary, and is the 178th president of MedChi, the Maryland State Medical Society.
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[ H/T Washington Examiner ]
