• AP Photos
  • George Will throws the ceremonial first pitch before a Cubs game in April. He was later unceremoniously dumped by the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

If you’re a print media groupie with a long memory, you might remember that George Will won a Pulitzer Prize in 1977 as a columnist for the Washington Post. If you can’t get enough of the Sunday morning TV talk shows, you might know him as the regular on ABC’s This Week who last October jumped to Fox News, putting him, in his golden years (he’s 73), in company too cozy by half. “I’ve known Brit Hume forever,” Will said at the time, “and Charles Krauthammer’s my best friend, so it’s good.”

The occasion was a Will column on sexual assaults on college campuses. It didn’t make the cut at the Tribune but the Post-Dispatch didn’t think twice about running it. It was afterward that the paper announced they were dropping Will altogether. “The change has been under consideration for several months,” Messenger would tell readers, in his note announcing that Will was out and Michael Gerson, also from the Washington Post, was in, “but a column published June 5, in which Mr. Will suggested that sexual assault victims on college campuses enjoy a privileged status, made the decision easier. The column was offensive and inaccurate; we apologize for publishing it.”

Messenger told me his paper had dropped the New York Times wire because it cost too much and switched to Washington Post columnists because they didn’t. So to add insult to injury, that’s why Will was in the paper in the first place: he came cheap. And it may not matter what he has left on his fastball; if he gets even cheaper there might be room for him back in the bullpen.

Messenger and his colleagues on the P-D’s editorial board decided that if they wanted to dump Will this was the time to do it. Messenger says readers overwhelmingly approved: 80 percent of the calls and e-mails the first day (“and more like 99 percent of the women”) applauded. “The thing I will never forget about this episode,” Messenger told me, “is talking to real women, with real names, telling me on their own that they are rape victims, and thanking me for standing up for them.”

Good for him. The Will of the C-Span interview was weary, straightforward, and serious. It’s interesting how compelling a pundit can be when he’s simply thinking and talking, rather than straining to earn a paycheck by getting off a zinger in this line and lobbing a grenade in the next. Writers should try it more often. Messenger’s counterpart at the Tribune is Bruce Dold, and although he called the Will column nobody liked “misguided and insensitive,” he says his paper has no plans to dump Will. “I don’t see a fallout in the general quality of what he does,” Dold told me. “His work is very well researched and he has an interesting point of view.”