My letter to John Tierney Re: his most recent elitist column.

[More Than A Feeling]

http://select.nytimes.com/2006/11/07/opinion/07tierney.html?hp

Dear Mr. Tierney,

It's clear to me from your latest column that you have a problem with average citizens discussing politics. Perhaps America would be a better country if we all just listened to the pundits like yourself, and only had opinions that did not contradict you. Oh, wait, you are also a citizen discussing politics. You are even writing about it! If your advice is more than self-congratulation for being "above it all", maybe you should be the first one to take it, and resign your column. No? Well, then, I suppose you will just have to endure the thought of citizens having opinions that aren't sanctioned or reinforced by the punditocracy.

Sincerely,

An average citizen with political opinions you don't like.

[DemocratSinceBirth]

1. I Don't Think That's His Point.

His point is that most folks only talk to folks who think like themselves and therefore think everybody thinks like them. Folks like have to have their own views shouted back at them.

[lapfog_1]

2. What a load of crap

<snip>
One of the cleverest demonstrations of this effect was a study published last year in Harvard’s Quarterly Journal of Economics. The researchers, Tim Groseclose and Jeffrey Milyo, devised a scale for measuring the slant of news reports by keeping track of which think tanks — liberal or conservative — were quoted most often.

The researchers found that The Washington Times and Brit Hume’s evening newscast on Fox fell on the conservative side of the scale, while all the other news media outlets they studied fell on the liberal side. The surprising result — to liberals, at least — was that Fox was closer to the ideological center than the Big Three evening newscasts as well as all the major newspapers and newsweeklies.

<snip>

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I guess it never occurred to these "researchers" that FOX has no need to quote think tanks... they simply pull the crap they spew right out of Karl Rove's ass. BTW, I wonder which think tanks Tim and Jeffrey work for now?

[DemocratSinceBirth]

3. I Don't Know About That Study

But the assertion that folks like to talk people who think like themselves seems pretty uncontroversial...

[More Than A Feeling]

4. Exactly, so why is he writing about it, unless he is implicitly

congratulating himself for being better than that?

[DemocratSinceBirth]

6. I Read The NYT...Tierney Fancies Himself A Liberterian Intellectual Conservative

Kind of like the guy he replaced, William Safire...


He really doesn't bother me that much...

[Spider Jerusalem]

5. That study is bollocks, and I'll tell you why:

The Republicans over the past twenty years have succeeded in redefining the American political spectrum in such wise that extreme right-wing radicalism is considered "conservative", while centre-right economic conservatives and social moderates like Bill Clinton are labelled "liberal". The non-Fox News and Washington Times media outlets are only "liberal" by this distorted standard; in comparison with the right-left political continuum in the English-speaking world outside the US, or with the West in general, they're by and large centre-right in their views.

[lapfog_1]

7. It's also based on a flawed assumption.

It assumes that FOX is a "news operation" in the same way that NBC or CBS have news operations.

And I'm not being glib here. FOX is a propaganda organization. It doesn't report news other than some canned car chase or fire segments. Almost everything else, especially the coverage of the "war on terror" is, by and large, exactly what the White House and the RNC want us to believe. Since it is NOT a news operation, there isn't any pretense made (or very little) by its operatives (correspondents in real news operations) to do anything like research. Why research something when the talking point is sitting right there in your email or on your fax machine (faux machine?). So, other than Brit, who still sort of fancies himself as a legit reporter (and who the study says is hard slanted right), there isn't anyone doing research and inserting think tank quotes on anything... even the polling that they quote is of dubious origin.

In addition to ALL that, you are absolutely right. What used to be considered the rantings of the wacko John Birch society is now considered simply "conservative"... while the politics of the Clinton's is now labeled liberal and that of Nancy Pelosi is labeled "far left". I used to think that *I* had become more of a radical. After all, in my group in college, *I* was the moderate, my roommate and our friends were all more radical leftists than me. But in the last 10 years I started thinking that I've become more radical, but NO, I actually haven't. It's the definitions that have changed.