...one would think those honest analysts who placed their faith in the administration's arguments for war and its ability to carry out a successful plan for Iraqi reconstruction would rethink that support as a result. This would be particularly true, one would imagine, for the editorial voices of America's major newspapers, whose roles in their respective communities -to say nothing of their charges under the First Amendment-depend on their established record for honesty and clear-sightedness. Alas, based on a thorough examination of the arguments of the editorial pages of four major U.S. newspapers by the journalist Chris Mooney in the new issue of Columbia Journalism Review, those newspapers that supported the Bush administration not only failed their readers during the run-up to the war; they have failed them ever since it ended as well.and
...During the debate over the war, the [Washington Post] adopted the McCarthyite tactic-much in favor at the Journal as well-of accusing those who thought Bush's war plans [were unwise] to be "standing with Saddam."We got a bit of that here at home too.
As for editorials closer to home, I'm still waiting to hear from The Union publisher Jeff Ackerman (for unknown reasons, could be email delivery failure due to Netsky B virus attack timing) answering my questions; editor Richard Somerville has responded with the succinct statement "The editorial speaks for itself".
I could use some help on the translation though, preferably into this language ("Imagine how different politics would be if debates were conducted in Tariana, an Amazonian language in which it is a grammatical error to report something without saying how you found it out") - which shares much with science language (with footnotes) and weblog language (with links). Not, alas, with newspaper editorial language.
No comments:
Post a Comment
Welcome, and thanks for caring enough to donate your time and thoughts toward greater collective wisdom...
Terms of engagement:
* Please be civil.
* * * * Please do not post anonymously * * * (I'd remove this choice if I could, and I may remove your comment if you do) - instead, do this:
Click on the 'Name/URL' radiobutton, then enter your real name (if you're brave) or a pseudonym (if you're not). (You can leave the "URL" field blank.)
Or go ahead and click "Anonymous", but put your name in your comment.
* The Management reserves the right to delete comments (Moderation Certificate can be found here). You can always post it on a blog of your own.
If you run into technical difficulties, please a) accept my apologies, then b) email your comment to aherror2011 at gmail.com with "Comment for [name of this blog]" in the Subject line.
New policy re climate contrarianism comments as of 11/11/2009:
Comments questioning the climate science community's understanding of climate change (97% of active climatologists now believe that the earth is currently warming and that it's human-caused - link) will be deleted unless the commenter:
a) is local
b) uses his real name
c) provides link(s) to substantiate his claim(s)/inference(s)
d) is willing to collaborate on constructing an argument tree, to get us past the usual sterile point-counterpoint-countercounterpoint.
(For people who can't read the above, a summary:
1) Be civil;
2) Don't post w/o giving at least a pseudonym;
3) Don't espouse climate-denial crankery unless you're local and willing to stand behind it.)
Caveats:
1. Comments could be delayed: they are being moderated, and I'm sometimes away from the computer for a day or more.
2. : Perfectly legitimate comments are sometimes miscategorized (by the blogging platform) as spam, & not published. If this happens to yours, please notify me, else I might not notice for a day or two.