Letters to the Editor
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Prof Smith
Prof. Smith,
Your note leaves me questions about your qualifications. Do you have any at all?
-Arun
PS: If I left it there, I'd be doing exactly what you did, which is not address anything of substance. I see two substantial questions in your note, one regarding qualifications and the second regarding style.
Are qualifications relevant? Are qualifications necessary to know that a job was poorly done (no matter how hard the job is or what qualifications it takes to do the job)? The answer is - in general, no. I know my car was not fixed, the quarterback played poorly, the food tastes lousy, the music or movie was bad, etc., etc., (gasp) the President made a poor decision to invade Iraq without being qualified to do any of those things.
Division of labor and specialization is possible precisely because of this property of the world - you do not have to have qualifications to know whether something is done poorly or not. If I needed to hire an expert to tell me whether another expert has done his job, then you see I have an infinite regress of experts. How do I tell whether the hired expert has done his job - hire another one?
Is Glenn Greenwald unjustified in his style? - vitriolic, you termed it. Well, we've wrongly invaded a country, worsened our problem with terrorism, lost habeas corpus and the 4th Amendment, suffered through two terms of George Bush in part because of the lousy job done by people like John King. When thousands die, are wounded, and millions become refugees as a consequence of journalists not being skeptical of government only vitriol is appropriate. Perhaps a journalism-war-crimes tribunal is even more appropriate.
Maybe if the reasoning power of our journalism professors was better, we wouldn't have John Kings.