She's a little formulaic in her use of "[insert name] gave me the clap" as the kill shot but she does get me to snickering from time to time.

In 1965 was interviewed by Fred Friendly, CBS News chief and Walter Cronkite's boss, for a sort of internship that he was inaugurating. I was a young news director at Pacifica Radio's Los Angeles station and looking to move out of that almost non-paying job, but about that time my bosses got the idea of sponsoring me for one of Friendly's newly created spots. I really had little desire to live in New York, but instead was trying to talk our board of directors into creating a Saigon desk. When Friendly Fred, informed of this, asked me why I wanted to go to Vietnam, I told him that there was a big goddamn war coming and that's where the news was going to be. He almost laughed me out of his office. I never did get to meet Uncle Walter; I was more interested in Uncle Ho. Three years later Cronkite got off his ass and went to Vietnam.

Bernie's comments are never, that I have observed, directly critical of anyone, except for Glenn.

They are general in nature and just go against what many posters on this thread think is right. Therefore their reaction is to declare her massively obtuse.

But is seems to me she is very consistent is creating these statements, on-topic, that are egregiously annoying to the people here. She never backs down nor does she ever stand corrected. At least when I am scanning the comments and reading her posts.

The more people criticize her typing and grammar the more she denigrates the worth of typing and grammar, and then indicates that her very worthwhile content is being ignored. But in reality it only takes a few seconds to read what you have written to see if makes sense and to check the spelling and grammar. Unless you add mistakes to get a reaction!

Never, that I can recall has she ever admitted a mistake. Or if she indicated she made a mistake, like a typo, it isn't important.

I enjoy reading her and Myrna and the frustrated reactions to their posts.

PC - hi. Thanks for reading me. We don't really cross-chat much, but you're one of the regulars here I always enjoy seeing with your elbow on the bar (or elegantly perched on a bar stool with your elbow elegantly placed on a dangled knee, I'll leave the final image up to you).

I don't think you and RMP are as far apart as you might think once you get past the conceptual fine-tuning and get down to what really matters in practice. But this is my purely subjective opinion.

RMP - strong points, well expressed.

A faux journalist believes what the reader/viewer concludes is their responsibility not mine. All I simply did was provide “objective” information. The sources are fully at fault, not me.

This is exactly the kind of "get out of jail free" card "objectivity" has become in the hands of fools, courtiers and mouthpieces. They don't know the truth because, while they suspect they won't be able to handle it, they know they don't get paid to handle it anyway, so there's no point in troubling themselves to discover just how inadequate their grasp of the situation truly is.

Every thought and decision is made through ones’ culture and life lived and it enters into all aspects of an investigation into the truth. Journalists are not scientists with the ability to conduct and verify their and others’ experiments to establish scientific facts. Journalists work with subjective sources and subjective thinking. Only through recognizing this can a journalist have any chance to find the elusive truth that in itself is subjective and open to much interpretation.

Not to exagerate, but subjectivity can be a challenge for scientists, as well: I recommend Natalie Angier's The Canon for a fascinating look by an amazingly brilliant and witty scientific journalist at the surprisingly human core of the various hard sciences. Like all culture, science at any particular moment is the result of specific questions asked, partial data bases assembled, shared assumptions and the speculative leaps brilliant, honest, well-meaning, but hardly infallible professionals are willing to take.

This makes science, particularly at the exciting margins, a matrix of daring best guesses. That doesn't make it "subjective", i.e., identical in intellectual or social value to the knee-jerk musings of the latest UT troll. Nor do I think you would argue it is. I just want to point out that there is some similarity between the uncertainties faced by the journalist and those that bedevil the scientist.

Journalists conduct experiments all the time. That's what "fact-checking" is - a test of what you think you know against some tentative new piece of information that may confirm your angle or twist it into something resembling a paper clip thrown into an industrial fan.

What journalists can't do - for the most part - is conduct controlled experiments. (The street makes a lousy laboratory: the rats keep stealing your white coats.) Journalists are closer to historians or history/fieldwork- based scientists like archaeologists or anthropologists than chemists or biologists: who you can believe about what subjects, how far your trust should go, what alternate sources of information exist, come (as you point out) from years of experience knowing the players and exploring the topography of the landscape. Knowledge of what counts as evidence and what is random or high-grade bullshit comes with time and slavish devotion, not through a simple instrument reading or a computer read-out or the press release of the day (in this, good journalists share many of the skills of the best detectives, too).

Scientists, historians, detectives, journalists - all have in various degrees to wrestle with issues of credibility and subjectivity, including the limitations of their own knowledge and point of view. But they also all share a focus on the objective, which I'll simplistically define as what matters in what really has happened and is happening. While imperfectly captured by any means at our disposal, we are dependent on the good intentions, hard work and accrued skills of thousands of dedicated men and women to uncover the ascertainable past in order for us to make decisions about an increasingly complex and uncertain future.

To which splendid and truly estimable effort the trollops of network, cable and beltway contribute the media equivalent of a suppurating social disease.

True journalists...should have a deep pain in their gut when their reporting fails to bring the change they desire and not blame anyone but themselves.

"We Report, You Decide" is no longer simply Fox's catch phrase. It's the gilded immunity shield the Williamses and Todds and Gregories of the media midway hold over their own consciences in the face of glaring evidence of their own sins of omission and commission, their ongoing failure to tell it like it is when it matters most.

"Journalists" in mainstream celebrity media have the same relation to that profession as the "delivery man" in a porn loop does to Fed-Ex.

Not scientists. Not historians. Not detectives. Not even close.

Just bad or deluded actors, getting paid to go through the rhythmic motions of a dirty job.