Letters to the Editor
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Praise for GG
Since my last few letters to Glenn were critical, I should make it clear I'm a big fan which agrees with most of what he writes.
For example, this is another great essay about the double standards in how pundits are labeled. This is so important because opinion and commentary has increased weight in news, especially on TV, radio and the web.
While there's never been a bias free era of news, the power of pundits to set the terms for real reporting of events has greatly increased. Real research and field observation is expensive or ideologically inconvenient or someting. Pundits gained this clout because they fill the hole in the news cycle left by the (at best) stagnant level of actual journalism.
Too much time is spent on analyzing and speculation about what events mean, and not enough on the events themselves. Thus we get more reportage on what the Iraq funding bill might mean than coverage of the war dead.
It also leads the media to treat a story as old or overdone, instead of realizing an ongoing story is not passe just because pundits are tired of discussing it.