Connecticut Man Declares Himself Most Hated Man in St. Louis

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SCREENSHOT VIA stltoday.com

Tod Robberson said good-bye in a final column where he declared himself the Most Hated Man in St. Louis.

In truth, most of you probably have no idea who Tod Robberson is. Or was. Dude was from Dallas and spent just a few short years here before hightailing it off to Connecticut. But during the years he lived here, and then a few that he didn't, Robberson edited the editorial page of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, which meant no small amount of harrumphing about things he knew absolutely nothing about (St. Louis, local politics, the accidental death of a county employee who had been close friends with the mayor, national politics, Democratic politics) and, every now and then, some really over-the-top bloviating about the one thing he sort of knew about (Very Important Journalism™, as practiced by white males in the glory days before the turn of the last century).

Despite his total irrelevance to the local discourse, this man of smudgy letters wrote a self-aggrandizing farewell column when he finally prepared to retire from the daily — again, two years after moving to Connecticut — in which he declared himself the “Most Hated Man in St. Louis.” How did he earn the title, this man no one much read? Well, the late shock jock Bob Romanik once blasted him on air (join the club) and, oh yes, former Aldermanic President Lewis Reed once stormed out of an interview. Magnanimous man that Robberson was, he nevertheless endorsed Reed for mayor and took every chance he got to snipe at Reed’s political opponents until Reed was sent to the Big House. But we digress.

In his farewell column, Robberson somehow managed to boast that he was shot by an American mercenary in Kabul, “kidnapped in Lebanon, captured by the military in El Salvador, fired upon in Iraq and accused by an Islamist cleric in Falluja of being a CIA spy after I spoke to him in Arabic.” After all that, surely Lewis Reed storming out of an interview was small potatoes, but then again, isn’t everything about St. Louis small to a talent so big, a journalism so grand, as Tod Robberson’s?

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Connecticut-Based Editorial Page Editor Is Leaving the Post-Dispatch: Tod Robberson never missed a chance to take a dig at progressives