Comments on: A Violin For The L.A. Times

By: Sean D. Martin

Sean D. Martin — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 20:13:00 +0000

What’s lacking isn’t a point of view. What’s lacking is actual journalism.

The reason nobody puts headlines like “BRAIN DEAD REPUBLICANS NEED A CALENDAR, SCIENCE SHOWS 365 DAYS A YEAR” or “TERROR LOVING DEMS NEED THEIR CLOCKS RUNG, GET PWNED BY CALENDAR” is because it would actually require them to check the facts of what they’ve been told.

Too many news outlets today just echo what they’ve been told.

By: Parthenon

Parthenon — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 16:37:00 +0000

I understand and sympathize with your point regarding the watering-down effect of objectivity in news – often it does lead to the sort of ‘he said, she said’ reporting as you mentioned in the calendar example, though I suspect deadlines may also play into that sort of laziness.

There are several problems with having an obvious point of view (to the point of hyper-partisanship in most cases), though. One is the tendency to only read publications that support one’s already existing world view. Your blog is unusual in that it boasts several well-spoken, fairly articulate conservatives. In my admittedly brief experience this isn’t the case – all others I read typically preach only to the converted, based on reading the comments.

Another is that I’m always suspicious that ‘point-of-view’ publications (they used to be called ‘yellow,’ I think) are hiding evidence from me, or using too small a data set. I have a friend, for instance, who gets most of his news from ‘onenewsnow’ and Fox and so believes that persecution of Christians is an extremely serious issue facing the world today.

By: Oliver Willis

Oliver Willis — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 16:05:26 +0000

I find the USA Today just as boring. I didn’t say the Post was successful, I said it was entertaining and tried to attract readers (frankly, I don’t know why the Post loses money). You can have a publication that uses facts that also has a point of view. The objectivity racket has brought us “Democrats, Republicans Differ On Amount Of Days In A Year”. The newspaper industry can keep that. I’d much rather a paper that said:

BRAIN DEAD REPUBLICANS NEED A CALENDAR, SCIENCE SHOWS 365 DAYS A YEAR

TERROR LOVING DEMS NEED THEIR CLOCKS RUNG, GET PWNED BY CALENDAR

By: August J. Pollak

August J. Pollak — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 15:57:50 +0000

You’re crazy. The New York Post? Seriously? Why not just say USA Today is a great paper? It’s shock news, plus sports.

I don’t understand how you could see a show like Inside Edition or Entertainment Tonight and say that it’s as good, or the same, or a worthy replacement, of an actual news broadcast. So why say that about the print equivalent?

Furthermore, the Post is in no conceivable way an indication of a successful print newspaper- they practically have to give it away, and it loses nearly $30 million a year.

It’s frankly depressing that you would even say- left or right- that you think news- by definition, something that is supposed to based on facts- should have a bias because that makes it interesting to you. That seems to be a much more self-centered way of simply saying you’re not interested in news when you don’t like it.