Letters to the Editor
L.W.M.
Published Letters: 5810 Editor's Choice: 5
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Party of one?
[Read the article: Brit Hume is a "journalist"; Keith Olbermann is "partisan"]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]-- shawnv... Brit Hume and Keith Olberman are both partisans...
...and if people can't see any comparison at all between the roles of O'Reilly and Olberman -- not whether they're good or evil, right or wrong, us or them -- but their roles, then you're seriously not even trying to be an honest observer of the media.
"In politics, partisan (political) usually refers to a fervent, sometimes militant supporter or proponent of a party, cause, faction, person, or idea. Although this is typically an appellation with negative connotations, some supporters embrace the term..."
They both claim to be independents, politically. I tend to doubt it in O'Reilly's case. I'm not convinced yet. Do you have anything else?
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Nope. No partisan here...
[Read the article: Brit Hume is a "journalist"; Keith Olbermann is "partisan"]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]"O'Reilly is a self-described independent and has used several terms to describe his views. In his book Culture Warrior, he identifies himself as a traditionalist and a populist. Previously a registered Republican for an unknown period of time, O'Reilly has been registered as having no party affiliation since 2001."
Maybe you have Olbermann's voter registration info in front of you... He says he's not a liberal, he's just an American. Ask me who I trust more.
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My apologies, Shawn...
[Read the article: Brit Hume is a "journalist"; Keith Olbermann is "partisan"]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]"and a lot of us who like our journalism old-fashioned"
I had no idea you were old enough to have seen Edward R. Murrow on the little B&W TV. Would I be correct in assuming that you probably had a small color set your parents provided for you in your bedroom during the 80s, and that's what you mean by old-fashioned journalism?
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Blame is more than a useful rheorical device
[Read the article: Brit Hume is a "journalist"; Keith Olbermann is "partisan"]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]It's essential to human development and basic to hominid behavior.
The fact that it is not flowing upward in our current administration is a distinct sign of organizational and systemic failure.
Jojo should be invoking Kurt Gödel about now...
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Jesus! You poor fellow. It's like a trip to the mall for you?
[Read the article: Brit Hume is a "journalist"; Keith Olbermann is "partisan"]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I believe, you can still inform yourself to an imperfect but reasonable degree by being a smart consumer of "the media."
Somehow I rather doubt you have developed the skill and ability necessary, or experience, to pull it off.
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jojo--
[Read the article: Brit Hume is a "journalist"; Keith Olbermann is "partisan"]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]When it comes to theory, I'm with Wolfgang Pauli. Most of it isn't right. It's not even wrong.
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"The Original Shrill One"
[Read the article: Brit Hume is a "journalist"; Keith Olbermann is "partisan"]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]In his 1965 review of Friedman and Schwartz's Monetary History, the late Yale economist and Nobel laureate James Tobin gently chided the authors for going too far. "Consider the following three propositions," he wrote. "Money does not matter. It does too matter. Money is all that matters. It is all too easy to slip from the second proposition to the third." And he added that "in their zeal and exuberance" Friedman and his followers had too often done just that.
A similar sequence seems to have happened in Milton Friedman's advocacy of laissez-faire. In the aftermath of the Great Depression, there were many people saying that markets can never work. Friedman had the intellectual courage to say that markets can too work, and his showman's flair combined with his ability to marshal evidence made him the best spokesman for the virtues of free markets since Adam Smith. But he slipped all too easily into claiming both that markets always work and that only markets work. It's extremely hard to find cases in which Friedman acknowledged the possibility that markets could go wrong, or that government intervention could serve a useful purpose.
Friedman's laissez-faire absolutism contributed to an intellectual climate in which faith in markets and disdain for government often trumps the evidence. Developing countries rushed to open up their capital markets, despite warnings that this might expose them to financial crises; then, when the crises duly arrived, many observers blamed the countries' governments, not the instability of international capital flows. Electricity deregulation proceeded despite clear warnings that monopoly power might be a problem; in fact, even as the California electricity crisis was happening, most commentators dismissed concerns about price-rigging as wild conspiracy theories. Conservatives continue to insist that the free market is the answer to the health care crisis, in the teeth of overwhelming evidence to the contrary.
What's odd about Friedman's absolutism on the virtues of markets and the vices of government is that in his work as an economist's economist he was actually a model of restraint. As I pointed out earlier, he made great contributions to economic theory by emphasizing the role of individual rationality—but unlike some of his colleagues, he knew where to stop. Why didn't he exhibit the same restraint in his role as a public intellectual?
The answer, I suspect, is that he got caught up in an essentially political role. Milton Friedman the great economist could and did acknowledge ambiguity. But Milton Friedman the great champion of free markets was expected to preach the true faith, not give voice to doubts. And he ended up playing the role his followers expected. As a result, over time the refreshing iconoclasm of his early career hardened into a rigid defense of what had become the new orthodoxy.
In the long run, great men are remembered for their strengths, not their weaknesses, and Milton Friedman was a very great man indeed—a man of intellectual courage who was one of the most important economic thinkers of all time, and possibly the most brilliant communicator of economic ideas to the general public that ever lived. But there's a good case for arguing that Friedmanism, in the end, went too far, both as a doctrine and in its practical applications. When Friedman was beginning his career as a public intellectual, the times were ripe for a counterreformation against Keynesianism and all that went with it. But what the world needs now, I'd argue, is a counter-counterreformation.
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/19857
http://www.sweetjesusihatebilloreilly.com/