Criticism from both sides

Link to Horses Mouth November 16, 2007 4:49 PM

I concur that the argument "we're making both sides angry, therefore we are doing a good job" from our news media is particularly specious. If that is their philosophy one really has to wonder what they think their job is that they are doing well. As a quick analogy I'm thinking that if at trial, both the defense and prosecution think the judge is doing a lousy job, it might just be that he is, in fact, doing a lousy job. It should hardly be taken as evidence that he is doing a good job.

Conservative Columnists

Kevin Drum, along with others, have put in their two cents worth to explain the results of this study by Media Matters. The upshot of the study is that conservative, syndicated columnists outnumber liberal, syndicated columnists at every type of of newspaper, big or small, urban or rural, liberal or conservative. One thing that might add to the explanation that I haven't seen mentioned. Although my views have always been distinctly left of center, when I was younger (in the '70s and '80s, before so much of the major media became crap) I always preferred to read the conservative columnists, George Will, Jack Kilpatrick, William Buckley and the like, as doing so helped to sharpen my own arguments. The conservative arguments were never persuasive to me, but they certainly helped make my own arguments better. I had, and have, an attitude that is particularly suited to the scientific disciplines, and the reality based community, in which one is constantly looking for ways to test one's beliefs and arguments. It seems to me that this point of view is particularly common among liberals and progressives, so it may well be that both sides of the isle have a strong desire to see writers on the right, but only left leaning readers want left leaning writers.

New Media

There is a lot that is important in this post at Talking Points Memo, concerning purgegate and the fired US Attorneys. However, one thing stuck out at me that concerns not politics but the media. It was this

(ed.note: As I mentioned over the weekend, our new reporter-blogger, Laura McGann, started at TPMmuckraker.com on Monday. And in the post linked above, she was, to the best of my knowledge, the first to report on the firing call Graves received back in January 2006. The Times followed a short time later with more details -- jmm.)

Emphasis added. The possibility of a new media, much more competitive and much more capable of reviewing itself (well the different parts reviewing each other) and self criticism is emerging. It ought to be possible in this day to find large reporter-bloggers in every community and thereby build an effective source of information around the world. It looks like Josh Marshall is doing that, and getting scoops. More power to him. This is the wave of the future.