Ed Wallis, why do I just know that you toil somewhere as a professor of comuuuuuunication? And why do I suspect that behind your overheated indignation is a guy with a whole wheelbarrow full of petty biases, political grievances, and unfounded options masquerading as sound methodology and dispassionate analysis? The journalism departments are overflowing with progressive sorts who can’t bear to think of themselves as deeply biased, but whose approach to any event, from the selection of the importance of a story to the way the facts are marshaled, is a pure product of a socialist catechism. The MSM has, for years, hid behind Lippmann’s fiction of journalism “above the fray” while churning out decades worth of slanted and tendentious stories, and now the whole project is teetering over. Ed, no one believes it anymore.
Just because the bias is upfront, doesn’t mean that the facts aren’t there or that the piece is somehow unethical. I’ll take an honest, deductive writer who is clear on his premises and sets out to prove his points, over a inductive phony who only pretends to “gather and disseminate information.”
And for someone who claims to appreciate the value of words, your use of the term “tragedy” to describe Mr. Boriss’s employment is inaccurate and lazy. We mostly have journalists to blame when such a fine word as tragedy is applied to everything from a broken leg to the death of a family pet to to a blogger’s opinion on the impartiality of journalism. With such misuse, a potent and sublime word slowly loses all meaning entirely (and with it, the complex set of ideas it designates). Too bad Harold C. Goddard isn’t around to set the comuuuunications majors straight on the matter.
