Reply #28: I am surprised that you still so thoroughly misunderstand me

[OnTheOtherHand]

1. Your line of argument recently has been pretty postmodern, so I have no idea what you would construe as "objective journalism." From (3), we have "print all sides of the debate in a balanced way." But, as I thought I had pointed out, that skips the crucial question: what debate?

Journalists stereotypically choose one debate, with roughly two sides, per story. It therefore behooves activists who actually care about winning to think very carefully about what debate they want to have.

To the extent that some activists have pushed to make the debate about whether 2004 was stolen (as opposed to whether the voting system is secure, reliable, and transparent), they have pretty well set us up for bad reporting on things like the primary "glitches."

In the case of this particular article, the writer identified the debate as how smoothly the 2006 elections will go. I agree with you that that is not the most important debate.

2. Whence do you derive the inference that I was defending the media against charges of being "too pro-corporate"?

3. Please reread 1, then reread my preceding post several times slowly.

(Yes indeed, in the end everything is human -- although I take it that in saying so, you do not intend to side with SCOTUS over the Florida Supreme Court.)

4a. What on earth does this mean? Where did I call anything "the 'DU side'"?

I certainly do not consider myself as opposite the DU side -- on the contrary, I think I am in the mainstream. I don't think that, say, Ernest Partridge is more on the DU side than I am when he derisively describes Democrats as "useful idiots."

4b. What is it that you want to debate? And whatever it is, what makes you think that I have set out to see or to portray only one side of that issue? That's not what OnTheOtherHand means, and I think you know it.

LS, I am one of the few people here who respects you enough to disagree with you -- directly. Why does that bother you? I can point you to plenty of posts (and maybe hundreds of e-mails) where Febble and I tried to work out how Kerry could have won. Where are the posts where you took the side opposite your predilections? How many people here who say Kerry won can honestly say, "I spent months trying to convince myself that Bush won, and it just didn't work"? How many can even honestly say that they tried to convince me?

No, I have no interest in "debating" some proposition -- this list has seen too many stupid debates already. If you want me to lay out both sides of a debate as fairly as I can, I will do that for you, and then you can chip in.