Letters to the Editor

• @ Bob,

  [Read the article: Keith Olbermann apologizes for his Clinton remark]
  [Read more letters about this article: Here]

  Sorry for taking so long to respond, you may not be reading anymore. But, yes, Tbrandel is correct. I was being sarcastic. If you've read Carol Richards' posts (and I suggest you read all of them) you'll know they are satiric pieces that point up every flaw in Joan's logic and Salon's coverage. At a point where there's nothing more to be said about Joan's clear bias, these letters make me laugh. Which is the best thing to do, just laugh at it all. And try to make the point that for a columnist to make a clarification of why they do something might be more helpful to readers than a simple assertion that they are doing something. What are the criteria for the position taken in regards to each candidate? Why is a particular position (even that of being balanced) chosen? Anyway, Carol's approach cracks me up and, instead of going on in my earnest, frustrated way, I decided to give it a chance. I enjoyed it, but that's not really my voice, and it doesn't work unless you keep it up consistently. I don't want to do that. Stephen Colbert's facial expressions, and the audience laughter let you know he's joking, but in a letters-column, you're apt to be misread and just bother people that you're acutally trying to entertain.

  Nevertheless, today's thread was interesting, wasn't it? We got this whopper is Joan's response:

  I continue to contribute my observations about some of the issues facing Barack Obama in the hope that people can understand why he's stuck right now. I don't do the same as often for Hillary Clinton because that's what 98 percent of the rest of media is busy doing. I think I only stand out as pro-Clinton because so much of the rest of the media is pro-Obama.

  She finally admitted that she doesn't criticize Hillary nearly as much as she does Obama, because she feels she has to balance the rest of the media. That, of course, to people who think logically, is a bias. In fact, it is the bias central to Fox News' "fair and balanced motto," as I've tried to explain to people for years. They think by presenting a consitently conservative viewpoint, they are balancing out the rest of the liberally scewed media. That's really what the phrase means (I'm not joking, I really think that's their aim...I don't agree with it, it isn't genuinely fair and balanced...but that's what the term signifies).

  Now Joan's admitted to that failure of logic in which by being unfair to one candidate, she's really being fair to both because the rest of the media isn't fair so she has to be unfair (differently) in order to even everything out. Or attempt to do so.

  Her continued frustration is evident, too. The responses here are "mean-spirited" and that makes her "sad." I'm not exactly sure why she should be sad. Politics are an impassioned topic. Thus the famous maxim that it's best not to talk about religion and politics. The intensity of responses on both sides is exactly what you'd expect, and it shows people care. You can be "objective" about some things. You can be objective about, say, why the sky is blue or why the evolution of the thumb gave man an advantage over the rest of the kingdom, or even why an economic policy fails or succeeds. But a candidate, a personal representative of your choices for the mindset and actions of the nation, is not something that can be objective. Because the choice of a candidate isn't based on objective factors but entirely personal ones: what programs do you want implimented? what ideologies do you favor? what future do you want for America? These are all personal questions. For everybody.

  Joan may in fact really believe she's being fair and equal, that Salon is, too. Really there's no help for someone that delusional. But it is fairly typical for people with a perspective ("I like THIS person better than THAT person") to view things in such a way that any threat to THIS person looks larger, more serious, more unfair than the treatment of THAT person. This happens all the time. Farhad Manjoo has written a book on it. It's no news to me. When I was young and very liberal, every liberal I knew bemoaned the "conservative" New York Times. When I got a little older and was for a while more conservative, I found the people I knew bemoaning that same New York Times, but now it was because the paper was so flagrantly "liberal." And nowadays, when I consider myself fairly moderate, I still talk to liberal and conservative friends who will make impassioned denunciations of this terrible New York Times—but whether it's terrible because it's liberal or conservative seems to change depending on the political slant of the person I'm talking to. It just might be relevent that the Times is the single most influential paper in the country and thus any attack on it's pages of someone representing a person's viewpoint is going to loom much larger in their minds than a attack on a viewpoint they disagree with. Because what they think of as "good" and what they think of as "bad" is not an opinion to them, it's a fact.

  Permalink Friday, April 25, 2008 10:28 PM