Letters to the Editor
ondelette
Published Letters: 1988 Editor's Choice: 19
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Fine, but...
[Read the article: Salon's new letters registration policy]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]There seems to be a font change involved as well, going to smaller, sans serif fonts for both title and body of the letters.
In addition, there are changes to the Preview function -- some of the paragraphing doesn't work properly in preview (but does in the final post).
Please, please, please... Change the fonts back. I love this site, and like participating, but I like to read what others have written first. The new fonts give my old eyes a headache, very quickly. Not a nice thing to do to a migraineur.
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@Armagednoutahere
[Read the article: The people who claim "the surge is working"]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Common Wisdom that is also the truth? Man could I ever live with that.
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@Joan Walsh
[Read the article: Salon's new letters registration policy]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Once I realized I needed to wear my glasses all the time when on the Web, I stopped being sensitive to that issue.
Just a gentle pushback, in response to a gentle slap:
I started wearing glasses all the time when they were still using PDP-8's and the Arpanet was still years from completion. I put them on before I get out of bed, I change them to read the computer screen or books, I take them off as I turn the light out at night. It goes without saying that I wear them when on the Web.
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In 2000, my first thought was of Newt
[Read the article: If only Newt Gingrich were president]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Seriously. When all the media descended on punch card voting, and people bubbled and burbled about chads, hanging chads, and all that, it occurred to me that in all the time I lived in Georgia, I never once looked at the back of my punch card after voting.
I and a lot of other people probably should have. Because of chads, punch cards have a 1 percent failure rate.
So when I heard about it, I thought Damn! Tony Center lost to Newt Gingrich in '94 by only 1600 votes. Supposing we'd all checked our chads?
I would like to take this opportunity to apologize to the rest of the country, maybe the rest of the world, for not doing so.
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I can think of a source...
[Read the article: National journalists believe you should trust them]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]...who fits this bill:
The sources for this specific story are, he claimed, ones with whom ABC has a "long relationship" and are ones they "find credible."
Ahmed Chalabi.
He comments on progress towards nuclear weapons, weapons of mass distruction.
He has a close (some say even an espionage) relationship with Iran, and,
ABC as well as all the other news organizations in this country have both a "long relationship" with him and have found him "credible".
The qualifications should be that the source has been found to be correct on the subject matter for which (s)he is being used, not that someone finds him credible. People found the Piltdown Man credible too.
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Now I'm sure, but not sure
[Read the article: National journalists believe you should trust them]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I was originally going to chime in that Paul Dirks' parsing was correct, and offer to be the one person whose trust in the media declined due to the cheerleading over the Iraq War buildup. I agree with both Thomas C and Margalis that polls need to be looked at much more closely to conclude things that they weren't originally created to measure. I'm sorry Thomas C deleted his analysis, I would have liked to read it. Honest.
But I started losing faith in the media during the Mark Fowler days. I wrote long letters to the broadcast networks about declining quality during the 90's, I hated the Dan Rather George H.W.Bush reverse ambush interview, and remember Leslie Stahl getting into trouble about voiceovers.
Did my faith in the media go down during the run up to the war? Yes, if worse to rock bottom means anything. I saw them downplay the millions of people trying to head off that war, make mincemeat out of El Baradei and Blix, and pretend afterward that anyone who didn't think Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction before the war was folded up inside Benjamin Spock and Howard Zinn's suitcase and stayed there waiting to come out until 2003.
My faith in the media declined not because the anonymous and classified sources they cited proved to be false, but because the transparent and obvious public information I saw and witnessed became unrecognizable within their skilled hands.
So, I end up being, well, complicated. I agree that GG is not distorting opinion in his post (Paul Dirk), and that a test of people who lose faith in the media should discount those who believe the weapons were there (Thomas C), and that you need to look at the exact same question --- with the caveat that you can run a more complicated analysis to argue that this knowledge isn't a complete black box because you didn't ---(Margalis). But I have to say that IF Hankest's main point is that media distrust comes from a lot of sources, then I agree with him too.
Oh, and while we're talking about polls, I took all the polls from Zogby, Yankelovich, Harris, and the media hybrids Times/CBS, ABC/Post, and cross checked them in S-Plus on the one identical question they all ask, about rating the performance of the President on his job. They show systematic biases, some are consistently to one side or another of each other over the periods between 2001 and 2004. That just ain't supposed to happen with a random sample. Not the same polling you all were discussing, but I thought I'd throw in my growing distrust of the polling people too, for good luck, and so that at a future time I can go off on a rant about the media's distrust of exit polls (Ha! a metatopic!), which have a much better margin of error, and aren't prone to loss of landlines and other things.