Working the Refs – Epistemology and Diplomacy

This says some good things — e.g., things to the effect that reporters are not “refs”, and that uncorrected systematic left-wing (or right-wing) bias is a sufficient reason to quit being a reporter (or to be fired, one would assume). But that doesn’t mean that a reporter — i.e., one who reports — can’t or shouldn’t commit to the objective of transmitting factual information that is as free from opinion as possible. Like the rest of us, reporters are human, and so there are limits to what’s possible with such an objective. But that doesn’t invalidate the objective.

This is to say that “… it’s silly to think reporters do not have a positive duty to act on these opinions, changing up their stance to counteract the influence of perceived craziness, the better to help their readers form sensible opinions. ” — is wrong, as would quickly be evident here if the bulk of reporters happened to have opinions that were right-wing. Let reporters report what was said — whether spin, craziness, or a breath of sense — and let commentators, priests, politicians, scientists, bloggers, etc., do whatever “helping” they can.

In other words, he wasn’t “a reporter with opinions.” He was flattering the liberals on that list by trash-talking Republicans. When he was in a room with Republicans, he’d trash-talk liberals. There isn’t any integrity there, just a craven desire to please.

That’s fine if he produces things I want to read that are also accurate.

UPDATE: I see Breitbart is now offering a $100,000 reward for the complete JournoList archives

It’s a bit more than “sigh”, this, isn’t it? Assuming that there are EU citizens on that list, he’s attempting to purchase their private correspondence in which they had a legitimate expectation of confidentiality. That’s a breach of their Article 8 rights, and I don’t think Breitbart is in a position to make the offer of “source protection” that he’s making – I am pretty sure that European courts wouldn’t recognise the purchase for $100k of an archive of private correspondence to be something that outweighs people’s right to privacy and I am not at all sure that the US courts would either. That mail archive would also be coypright the people who read it, so it’s effectively stolen property.

A very thoughtful post.

It does seem to me that the biggest problem with the soccer analogy is that in soccer there are a clear set of rules that everyone involved (players, refs, fans) can refer to.

No such set of rules exists in politics or journalism (except in extraordinary cases, e.g. political assassinations, stolen elections, etc., when political behavior actually runs afoul of the law). To put it another way (and using a somewhat different sports metaphor), the players are always moving the goalposts in part because there are no stable goalposts to begin with.

There are at least two obvious consequences of this disanalogy. First, a “game” with no set rules significantly complicates the notion of impartial refs.

Second, though I’m generally sympathetic to John Holbo’s argument in this post, this passage seems slippery:

It’s clear all political players are going to be constantly pushing preferred frames and self-serving talking points. Sometimes people are going to go too far. Sometimes way too far.

How can one develop a standard of too-far-ness…especially in the absence of a clear set of rules?

Off the top of my head, the way out of this problem isn’t through determining how much flopping is acceptable, but rather through comparing the spin to reality itself. Journalists need to abandon the world of he-said-she-said, of reporters’ understanding their job as basically consisting of telling the public what various people have said. We don’t have a spin rulebook and we’re not going to get one. But we do have the real world. When the president says that global warming exists and my Senator denies it, journalists have a duty to familiarize themselves with the science and report on who is telling the truth.

Reality has one further advantage (or disadvantage if a party or a society is to committed to ignoring it): rules in a game like soccer need someone to enforce them. Whether or not reporters decide to make reality part of what they’re responsible for, reality isn’t going away. Absent significant behavioral changes, catastrophic global warming will happen whether or not we acknowledge it politically. We may not be interested in reality, but reality is interested in us.

John: This is what I meant by saying that good reporting is inherently on a slippery slope. It’s on a slippery slope to a kind of paternalistic encouragement of ‘right thinking’. But there is simply nowhere for journalism to be but at the top of this slippery slope. Your job is to package information in such a way that people will form sensible opinions about what you are talking about, based on that information.

I don’t doubt that reporters need to package information. I do question the aim of getting people to “form sensible opinions about what you are talking about, based on that information”, since I think that already takes them off the top of the slippery slope and half way down it. I don’t think good reporting can get away from the aim, simplistic though it may sound these days, of objectivity, which may look similar to that of getting people to form sensible opinions, but in fact is quite different in its focus — a focus, that is, on reality, as Ben Alpers says, as opposed to people’s “sensible” opinions. Its just that sort of aim or objective that hardens the otherwise too slippery ground beneath their feet.

Re #14, there’s another interesting legal question: If Breitbart’s wildest hopes come true, and the archive reveals agreements among employees of different media companies as to how particular events should be covered, are those agreements in restraint of trade? Obviously the US Justice Department is unlikely to investigate such a claim, but the Virginia Attorney General is a fire-breather and might start serving subpoenas.

What it means to be informative is to provide information that will, on the whole, conduce to the formation of sensible opinions about things by reasonable people.

No, this is where we differ. What it means to be informative is to provide information, full stop. “Bias” enters the picture as soon as you start thinking about things like the formation of “sensible” opinions, by “reasonable” people, since of course the notion of what qualifies as sensible opinion, or who constitute the reasonable people is precisely what’s at issue. That’s not to say I’m opposed to “the formation of sensible opinions about things by reasonable people”, but that’s for the reasonable people themselves to do, whoever they be, as possibly aided by, as I said originally, commentators, priests, scientists, ethicists, bloggers, etc. — but not for reporters (at least the good or honest ones).

The whole episode shows bad judgement by the Washington Post.

This is the paper that hosts open racists like Krautheimer as op-ed columnists but fired Dan Froomkin for being too liberal. If you look at their current op-ed lineup it is totally dominated by movement conservatives. Yet the paper is meant to be centrist?

They had a blogger assigned to report the conservative movement but somehow the liberal blogs were not important enough to do the same. Which is odd as the liberal blogs were a force in Democratic politics since Dean’s run in 2003/4. And unlike the conservative blogs which see themselves as a mouthpiece for the policy decided by a GOP administration, the liberal blogs actively engage and attempt to set the agenda.

One reason the Post does not want to do this of course is that the liberal blogs are competitors in the news distribution business and the conservative blogs are not.

As for the list being exclusively ‘liberal’, I very much doubt it. More than a few ‘liberals’ are pretty much Bushies when it comes to Iraq or Israel. Joe Klein was on it for a start. And now he is coming to a defense of Goldberg. And he has in the past publicly lied about his work. Interesting.

John,
I might say more about this later. It seems, however, that you are conflating “journalists” with “popularizers” (as in “not economists but rather journalists”).

Let’s, from this point on, stipulate that we’re not talking about “streaming raw data”, any more than, in referring to “bias”, say, we’re speaking of deliberate deception.

What I’m objecting to in your post is the reportorial aim of “forming sensible opinions” for “reasonable people”; what I’m saying is that the aim should be conveying objective reality, and that that’s the aim that should guide decisions on what to include and how to structure the package of information that the reporter delivers. Of course such an aim will necessarily involve decisions about relevance, importance, etc., and I don’t doubt such decisions will unavoidably carry with them certain opinions. But that’s a kind of inherent bias that good reporters can strive to be aware of, and careful about, and in any case is quite a different thing from setting out with the aim of forming opinions (which, it should go without saying, are always “sensible” and “reasonable” to the opinion-holder).

This is supposed to apply to reporters for a paper that feels a need to answer accusations of bias after asking David Frum to review a bio of Rush Limbaugh? That feels the need to employ no one who has a bad word to say about Matt Drudge for fear of accusations of bias?

Individual responsibility is the wrong tree to bark up. Most of the journalists will think that they are doing a proper job but somebody else decides whether they get a job or whether their story is printed. Plenty of lefties have worked for the Daily Mail for example.

Not that such professionalism would be easy to achieve. In the UK you’ve only to look at sports journalism to feel thankful for the high standards of political reporting.

The conservative working of the ref does not have to be inspired by a perceived injustice as much as it does a perceived effectiveness. Judging by Mr. Alexander’s work, such perceptions are not misplaced. It’s a tactic that’s also open to non-conservatives as well of course but in general it doesn’t seem to be as effective in other hands (Alastair Campbell being a notable exception). It might be suggested that it’s because of who owns the papers or who owns the advertising budgets with the outrage providing useful cover. Those forcing the issue have a lot to answer for as well of course — most journalism is far better if it is covering something not known in advance to be contentious.

I think that what is being missed in this discussion is the critique made by the blogosphere of the establishment media as being an insular and self-perpetuating group.

Joe Klein has an interesting attack on Greenwald in the Time swampland blog. Interesting because he fails to mention that his dismissal over lying about authorship of Primary Colors involved somewhat similar circumstances, interesting because he leaps to Goldberg’s defense attacking Greenwald for ‘hating America’ and interesting because Ezra Klein started Journolist after an email exchange with Joe Klein. Perhaps he protests too much.

What we are seeing here is not a steady decline in journalistic standards, rather it is the exposure of the shoddy practices and establishment bias that has infected the press in the US for a century. Unlike pretty much every other industrialized country, the US has never had a national press. The local papers have dominated and as a result the papers have had to avoid antagonizing any large opinion block.

This situation made possible the red scares of the 50s. If McCarthy had tried similar tactics in the UK he would have been ripped apart by the Labour and Liberal leaning newspapers. Since the demise of Hearst, the US media has set itself up as the impartial judge. In the European model the media has been more akin to the lawyers arguing the case for each side.

What the Post is doing here is doubling down on the strategy of not giving offense. Which in the current era of movement conservatism means not mentioning the fact that Drudge is a fabricator, Palin is a liar and Fox News is a propaganda outlet. To avoid giving offense to conservatives it is necessary to report Palin’s ‘death panel’ claim without pointing out that it is a deliberate lie, report her claiming to say ‘thanks but no thanks to that bridge to nowhere’ when in fact she did nothing of the sort and somehow report her attacking Obama for supporting offshore drilling which she opposed without mentioning the fact that she was chanting ‘drill baby drill’ only months earlier.

As far as what people actually say the bounty offered for the journolist archive reminds me of climategate. Is this one sided or are there people also looking for Judy Miller’s emails or those of the AEI or big oil or recordings of what Rush Limbaugh says to his mates or what Lord Ashcroft has to say about the UK?

When I say ‘forming sensible opinions’, I mean something like: in writing about how the health care system works, say, you should write in such a way that a reasonable, literate reader will come away from reading your piece with true rather than false beliefs, with an appropriate sense of what really matters for how things work.

Well, are the “true” beliefs this “reasonable” reader is expected to come away with beliefs that a Republican, say, would recognize as such? Or a rightist? Or a conservative? Or Rush Limbaugh? Of course, they might be, but then I suspect that most on this list would call that bad journalism (as they often have).

And that’s certainly one approach to journalism, harkening back to the 60’s — since “objectivity” is a myth, let’s just be partisan, or “committed to social justice” or whatever, and be done with worrying about it. The cost of doing that is simply writing off large segments of the population as merely unreasonable, illiterate, stupid, mendacious, crazy, etc. — which of course is done all the time, on all sides. Not that that’s too high a cost for the committed, but for those tiring of such, we might want to think of another possible model for journalism.

So, along those lines, let me try one more time to clarify my point about that other model, or at least try to say what it isn’t. I don’t disagree that ‘presenting objective reality’ = ‘cause reasonable people to form sensible opinions’ — indeed, that might be true pretty much by definition of “reasonable people”. But that’s after the fact of the article, and in that sense outside of the scope or proper control of the reporter. I do disagree, then, that the aim or objective of ‘presenting objective reality’ = the aim or objective of ‘causing reasonable people to form sensible opinions’. The point is that the reporter’s job is, or should be, simply to present reality as best he can, and let the opinions, like chips, fall where they may — once the reporter starts to focus on forming others’ opinions, he/she is already too far down the slope.

As for #21, the first batch of emails included his “paultards” comment, while the second batch is where he says “Honestly, it’s been tough to find fresh angles sometimes-how many times can I report that these [tea party] activists are joyfully signing up with the agenda of discredited right-winger X and discredited right-wing group Y?”

Certainly, he has every right to say these things, but again it doesn’t surprise me that the Post wouldn’t think that anyone on the right was going to talk to him any longer. Weigel himself doesn’t really dispute any of this: “Why did I assume that I needed to crack wise and rant about people who, usually for no more than five minutes were getting on my nerves? Because I was stupid and arrogant, and needlessly mean.”

That’s a defensible reading, I agree, but it’s at least as contemptuous of his subjects as what I proposed, it seems to me.

Am I missing something here?

Weigel was fired because he works for a corporation that has an agenda that Weigel’s comments tended to work against. I can’t imagine why anyone would take at all seriously, would be at any pains to refute, the rationalizations that the corporation offered, that he had violated some sort of “journalistic” standards.

The WaPo arrives at my doorstep (not by my choice) every day. I leaf through it most days. It escapes me how someone familiar with it would even think to apply the concept of “journalism” to what it does, least of all some lofty concept of a journalism that serves as the referee of our nation’s public discourse. It’s a business, not a referee, not any sort of public or publically responsible institution.

Now, if it were a business run so as to make a profit at “idea arbitrage”, then perhaps you would expect it to at least move in the direction of providing some sort of refereed forum. There would be competition to provide the best idea arbitrage, in order to do well as a business, and we might see some effective refereeing, if only to arrive at a product that would sell better than the competition.

But it’s not at all clear that idea arbitrage was ever much of a profit center in newspapers. And now, the papers don’t make money off of anything anymore. If you’re going to keep a money-eater such as WaPo going nowadays, you’re only going to do so because you expect to get enough value pushing your agenda that its worth losing the money you lose every quarter. Why would anyone expect them to keep Weigel on when that no longer makes sense in terms of WaPo’s messaging strategy?

Of course they aren’t at all serious about the rationalization they offered, that Weigel violated some sort of journalistic standards, so it’s not hard to shoot it full of holes. They have to keep up the pretense of something called “jouranlism”, because that enhances message delivery. People are too sophisticated to put any confidence in propaganda, so you have to make the representation that your propaganda is objective journalism to get around this sophisticated defense put up by all these clever university-educated people we have about us these days.

The Pentagon was caught a few years ago putting out propaganda that was staged as newscasts. They did it because that’s how you get propaganda around the defenses, but they were foolish enough to use a brute force method and hire actors to pretend to be journalists for a few days, where everyone who knows what they’re doing hires non-actors to put on the act as a permanent career. It’s seamless that way, and you can’t get caught, because you don’t settle for some pathetic, two-dimensional Potemkin Village that is put up for a day, then knocked down. You construct a whole Potemkin Country that lasts for as long as any country can last that abandons reality testing.

A good reporter will understand this about him/herself, and will, moreover, be aware that there are other opinions about said interpretations, etc. that are held by significant portions of the audience, and will, because of that, be careful to include such alternate interpretations in the report, despite—in fact, especially despite—her/his own deeply held opinions.

What a terrible vision. I sentence you to one year of David Broder.

… you should not report nutty things people say in ways that generate the positive impression that these things are not-nutty, just because the people who hold them are ‘important’.

Well, I take your point — it must be difficult for reporters to distinguish between the attention due the views of (to take a couple of different examples) Rosie I’Donnell, say, and Nancy Pelosi just on the basis of the sanity of their pronouncements. But, as you say, just because it’s tough doesn’t make it less proper, and necessary. Where I think you go wrong in your notion of “epistemic affirmative action for unreasonableness ” is in thinking that the public, i.e., the audience, needs to have their hands held and their minds guided by the gentle and knowing prodding of the reporter. But — and this recalls something you’d said earlier, actually — reporters are not superior beings, and trying to impose this sort of cultural arbitration on them is the real impossible burden. Such a burden not only risks turning them into partisan shills, it too often realizes such risks. This is to say that it’s really for the public to determine when someone is gaming the system, which they’re at least as capable of doing as the reporter, and then of punishing the gamester appropriately — and of course, as I’ve said before, there are a range of other intermediaries (columnists, priests, scientists, etc.) that can assist the public with such judgments when needed.

A burden that reporters are able to bear, however, and indeed need to, is to assess the range of opinions that actually are current relative to the particular issue and to provide those to their audience in a reasonably balanced manner, without regard to their personal opinions on the matter. That’s tough too, but it’s possible. And not only possible — as a regulatory goal, it acts as negative, as opposed to positive, reinforcement of the reporter’s human tendency to “sin in predictable ways” (i.e., in letting his own bias infect his reporting).

Just a note about “splitting the difference between an already split difference, etc.”:

Also called “moving the goal posts”, this is just a version of John’s “gaming the system”, and, believe me (or not), all sides are aware of such games and know the frustration they can cause. But this is just one of a great number of such rhetorical and political moves, stratagems, tricks, etc. that all sides play and are played by — it’s, sad though it be, a part at least of how politics works in reality as opposed to civics textbooks. Given that, reporters have two general options: they can become cogs themselves in such machinations, or they can observe them more or less neutrally and relay their observations to the public. What they can’t do, because they have no superior position or vision, is act as arbiters of the process, not only above the fray but determining who’s right and wrong (or, in these more frenzied days, who’s sane and who’s nutty) — if they try to, or if others try to foist such a role on them, they end up just as tarred as any of the other players.

What they shouldn’t do is take sides in the debate

A quick look at your site shows how much you disapprove of side-taking. This is not a sincere argument.

But the people you link to play reporter.

I think they’re all just bloggers, Substance

I don’t think you’ve noticed what they think they are.

What they can’t do, because they have no superior position or vision, is act as arbiters of the process, not only above the fray but determining who’s right and wrong

It’s their responsibility as reporters to have superior information, at least. If they don’t have that, if they don’t know more about the issue they are reporting on than the average member of their audience, then they have no business reporting at all. If they *do* have that, then aren’t they obligated to share it? It’s not a class structure, it’s a freaking profession.

Maybe it will be clearer to take a specific example. Any fool can listen to Inhofe spout off about how climate change is a myth. A reporter can also research the issue and discover that Inhofe is nuts (on that issue). Shouldn’t they point that out, or pass on the evidence that proves it, rather than allowing Inhofe’s nuttiness to pass unchallenged? That way their audience won’t have to individually duplicate the research (which presumably the reporter is more qualified at, but even if they weren’t it would be at a minimum monstrously wasteful).

P.S. It’s always frustrating to see one of the participants in a discussion bolt just as it’s picking up steam, but maybe he’ll reconsider or someone else will take up the banner.

@67: Uh, perhaps you’re not familiar with Inhofe’s views on climate change? It really does not take a lot of research to realize that he is far out of touch with evidence or reason on that issue. (And the whole point of the sub-thread is to condemn “Views Differ on Shape of Earth” pseudo-journalism. Maybe you would have preferred an example involving the literal shape, rather than the temperature, of the Earth?) Maybe I moved too fast in assuming that it was common knowledge, though.

What’s wrong with “the whole Journolist phenomenon” is that Weigel got canned for a bullshit reason. Journolist itself is fine, or would be fine if people didn’t attribute to it an importance that it doesn’t actually have and never did. Unlike climate change, though, those are matters of opinion.

Journalists, fundamentally, exist in order to concentrate the information gathering and investigative functions. People listen to, watch, read, etc. journalists because it’s less trouble than doing all the research themselves, and because the journalists are supposed to be professionals more skilled at finding things out, and will therefore produce better results than an amateur trying to do the same job.

That’s fine. We’ve had a good discussion, and I think the devolution into nuttiness illustrates that it’s pretty much run out of steam by now.

Well, it’s a good strategy on the part of the nuts to make sure the nutty get heard without influence from meddling journalists, isn’t it?

Good questions, bianca. They’re presumably lower than “Platonic Philosopher Kings” on the one hand, but they’re “smart and moderately canny, well-trained and professionally-minded and so forth,” yet fallible, “a modestly virtuous class”, possessing “a modest degree of personal ‘epistemic virtue’ (clunky term)”, and “good judgment”. That looks to me like a claim of something like your binary model — but in my view, of course, that claim itself is the myth.

I really don’t think it’s the business of reporters to try to police issues at all — so if the news is that Inhofe says global warming isn’t occurring, then that’s what should be reported, period. If it’s thought that some sort of background is needed, that’s fine provided it’s background that fairly presents the actual dispute regardless of the opinions of the reporter. What’s not fine is for the reporter — who, presumably, is no more a climatologist than Inhofe, or for that matter you or I — to tack on some isolated factoid, or drag in some tame expert, in an effort to cast the views that he’s reporting in a bad light.

So, in my view, none of your scenarios are good reporting, and 2 is merely 3 in a disguise so transparent that it fools no one, despite the fond hopes of those who are already inclined to the views of the reporter anyway. Those not so inclined will have long since learned to dismiss the “reporter” as merely biased, which is pretty much what we actually see around us now.

I should say a word, though, on the so-called ‘“Views Differ on Shape of Earth” pseudo-journalism’. To my mind it’s a common, but very simple-minded, rhetorical device to compare a legitimate dispute to an obviously discredited one and think that you thereby discredit the first — sorry, you don’t. A reporter does have to be able to distinguish such disputes, certainly, but they also have to aware of , and beware of, efforts of True Believers to influence them by engaging in such dishonest tactics.

Okay, I know I said you should have the last word, and so you should. But I can’t resist pointing out that the problem with your analogies between reporters and other professions is that, by your account, the area of expertise of the reporting profession is your and my opinions — not our cars or our teeth, but our opinions, about what and who is right and wrong, sane and nutty. I’d say that sounds a little Klaatu-like (or Klaatu-lite), but in any case it does seem to elevate them above the mass of humanity in a way that a merely focused expertise does not. What’s worse is that, unlike with pundits, say, from whom you can pick and choose among a diverse variety of opinions, as you can even with, gods know, priests, scientists, or bloggers, all of whom are a disputatious lot, with ample room for heresies of all sorts, reporters apparently are there simply to tell you the true opinions, which you can doubt only at the risk of being labelled nutty yourself. Of course, fewer and fewer people are being cowed by that any longer, but I still contend that the insistence on an aim for the profession of forming or guiding opinion is bad for it — undermining what reputation it has, and tending toward a spreading skepticism and dismissal of its reports by anyone not in the choir, so to speak, to begin with. But, we’ve been down this road already, no?

Sigh. Okay, ya got me.

But under no circumstances should they do what you suggest: namely, just take it to be axiomatic that they are unusually bad at doing something that ordinary people are pretty good at doing. Namely, turning knowledge of basic facts into reasonable views about what views of those facts are reasonable and what aren’t.

This is wrong in so many ways that it gets hard to know how to start, but let me try. Reporters are ordinary people. Okay? Therefore, they’re not “unusually bad at doing something that ordinary people are pretty good at doing”, namely, etc. Okay? That is, they are as capable of forming their own opinions about issues as you or I or anyone else is, including dentists, auto mechanics, etc. Right? This persistent misunderstanding or misrepresentation of something so obvious and basic begins to look like bad faith, or mere baiting. But let’s ignore that. What then is the problem with reporters seeking to form or guide their audience’s opinions, based on their own? Just this: that it is an abuse of their professional position, which not only gives them access to major media outlets — pundits and opinionators generally have such access too after all — but which assumes a kind of trust that the reporter, qua reporter, will actually provide information that is undistorted by the reporters own opinions. Not, please note, because the reporter is somehow incapable of forming such opinions or incompetent to do so, but simply because the reporter is not Klaatu and has no superior ability to do so, and people quite naturally resent the implied arrogance of those who imagine they have.

But, you know, I think this has long been obvious, and I think you’re repeating yourself as much as I am. I’ll try again to refrain.

Hey, I’ll play as long as you do, after all.

You could only prescribe what you are prescribing on the basis of a view that is obviously way too extreme.

Not so — it merely depends upon being able to distinguish opinion from observation and information, which not only ordinary people can do but reporters too. Philosophers I’m not so sure about, but then they’re afflicted with a host of other problems as well.

So your prescription must be wrong. You need to articulate some better sense of the class of journalists’ opinions that you think are not just possibly mistaken but, in fact, so likely to be ‘distorted’ that we can safely assume they are, knowing only that opinion x is held by a journalist.

No, as I’ve said, I’m sure that most reasonable people would be able to understand that the need to avoid injection of one’s own opinions in a matters of observation has nothing at all to do with the likelihood that such opinions are distorted — it has instead to do with the notion that such opinions always may be distorted, and hence distorting, as may anyone’s. (Note, by the way, that this has nothing to do with “diplomacy”, or splitting the difference.)

As for political motivations, well — your assumption of an inherent, indeed class, superiority of reporters I do think is sad evidence of the underlying elitism that permeates large sections of contemporary culture. Worse, and even more revealing, it illustrates at the same time a defensiveness within those segments that fears its old certainties are undergoing critical, and perhaps undermining, scrutiny, and yearns for a source of political validation that they think, or at least would like to think, the good journalists are able to provide. No wonder there is such energy devoted to trying to prop up the fading credibility of such sources, and such anxiety at seeing the dwindling numbers of those willing to accept them, even with the halls of academe. Just saying that you don’t really have to go down with the ship you’re trying so hard to keep afloat.

John’s response to itzik just repeats something I’ve already dealt with (see comment 79 above). Note, though, that in his response he’s again quite able to understand the distinction between opinion and observation, just as he obviously once was in the debate earlier — it’s where his anxiety over “affirmative action for unreasonable views” comes from, for example — without blowing smoke about “belief”, etc. I think what we’re seeing in that is just John retreating into his hard shell, to mix metaphors, of philosophical quibbling over terminology. Which can go on for a very long time — hundreds if not thousands of years in fact — and I don’t think I’ll get involved in it, fascinating though it no doubt is.

I think the small response–#91–is troubled in a way consistent with problems with that side of the argument throughout this entire debate. My layman’s ( a reader and watcher of reporters) assumption in my hypo is that there are genuine controversies concerning global warming–are the significant causes–in relation to state expenditure and action– man made or natural, others–an assumption also bolstered by seemingly respected academics moot such issues; and my further assumption is that Inhofe is a highly placed, quite outspoken with some background of knowledge and vigorous critic of what he calls some hysteria surrounding global warming. But, somehow, reporting fairly–in my hypo–on a debate between Inhofe and Gore, where fair reporting can fairly lay out the weaknesses in Inhofe’s case, if they exist, is tantamount “to affirmative action for unreasonable views held by ‘news worthy’ people. If we go for this option, we ought to admit that upfront: we are requiring reporters to mislead audiences, in rather predictable ways, for the sake of preserving an appearance of not misleading audiences, i.e. being ‘even-handed’. ”

Respectfully, this response is the grain of sand in which we can observe what strikes me as the entirety of the anxious paternalism of the John Holbo side of the argument.

See how silly it is?

Bianca, neither of those work.

Well, in a biological sense, mothers are a necessity, in a familial sense, many children go without mothers – although children do need someone to raise them, and conveniently nobody seems interested in paying mothers for their labour. The set of bass players overlaps with the set of rock musicians, but neither set is necessary to the other.

Is this news?

http://inhofe.senate.gov/public/

Rather, if we are saying we should not have reporters, we are either saying anyone can do reporting and we should print the writing of anyone who does the hard work of gathering, organizing, and writing up the data; or we are saying reporting is not needed and we should give everyone access to the data and the skills and (at times occasional background knowledge) to understand it; or we are saying newsmakers should write down their own stuff and get published directly for a broad audience.

But I am not happy with this logic, which seems to assume that because journalists don’t always meet very high standards (especially in the absence of things like training that cannot be assumed present in all cases), journalists should aim low; and it turns out that when they aim that low, we don’t really care to pay for what they’re able to do, or we think it’s harmful to society, or something; and since it’s absurd that we should stop having journalists, we accept that journalism really isn’t that helpful to people who are interested in truth, or something, but that we live in an imperfect world and can’t have anything, much less force everyone to be everything to everyone.

Global warming is a terrible example if only because so many people don’t understand simple things about science, and more so because John’s original post didn’t apply only to political hot issues.

Tip-toeing back in again to make a quick terminological (!) point: “journalism” seems like a general word that covers people from pundits, say, who opinionate as well as interview (e.g., Walter Lippman), to reporters, who are typically assigned to gather news. My criticism of the focus on the audience’s opinions has to do with the latter end of the spectrum, which, I would continue to say, provides a needed or at least useful service but only if it can be reasonably insulated from the opinionating end. If it can’t be, then I’d agree that we don’t need “reporters” as such, and let’s all just be bloggers now.

Take the Inhofe case.

Or, take the Gore case. Let’s suppose your considered opinion, after much gathering of facts, interviewing, etc., is that Gore’s views are so nutty they’re simply laughable. No one serious takes them seriously. Etc. Do you say, as a reporter you should report this result? Or soft-pedal it, lest you appear too partisan? I.e., you’ve come to the respectable analytic conclusion that ‘Gore is a jerk’ and you can say so in a way that looks like good journalism — do we rule out that sort of good journalism as unprofessional?

Hmm? Or maybe there’s something wrong with this whole frame of reference, this way of looking at things. Maybe “taking sides” vs. “diplomacy” isn’t the right alternative at all. Maybe reporters as reporters could simply report what both Gore and Inhofe say without trying to insert their own opinions, not because they’re being or trying to be “diplomatic” or refs — neither of which they are, of course — but simply because that’s their job, and that’s what we all need them to do. You can still certainly recognize, just as any other human being can recognize, that Gore is nutty and a jerk, but you are also capable of recognizing that others dispute that. So even if you’re completely convinced that Gore is wack, you have the discipline to separate that conviction from your reporting (you, as John puts it, can “weirdly quarantine” that part of your beliefs) — not, again, out of a mere desire to be “diplomatic” or appear non-partisan, but simply out of a regard for the professional standards of reportorial journalism. That’s another possible way of looking at reportage. As a side benefit — i.e., not as your deliberate aim, since such would be meanly calculating or manipulative, as opposed to professional — but as a side benefit, that view of the job of the reporter might go some way toward rebuilding your reputation on all sides as a credible source of information.

We need to separate the question of what reporters should do in principle from what our actual views are of Inhofe and Gore. And, once we have done that, I think we see that my principle is the more attractive one.

Okay. That’s largely what prevails now, in fact, with “reporters” (scare quotes necessary for me) going around telling everyone who’s a jerk, nutty, etc. (in so many — diplomatic! — words) based on their personal opinions, which in turn are based on their worldviews, values, ideologies, partisan allegiances, etc., on both left and right. I.e., no one but the most credulous believes that their opinions arise simply from their “careful and scrupulous study”. To my mind, it’s not a particularly attractive picture on its own, and loses what little appeal it may have when juxtaposed to a principle that would emphasize reportorial objectivity and the exclusion of personal opinions — but maybe that’s all just a matter of taste.

Here, though, I’ve come to a realization. I think that there are significant numbers of people, not necessarily the most partisan or zealous, who quite literally are unable to separate fact and opinion, or even to see that there’s much of a spread or spectrum. For such people, statements like “Inhofe/Gore is a nut case” are no more a matters of opinion than statements like “the sky is blue” or “the sun rises in the east.” Op-ed sections of newspapers must differ from news sections, for these people, only in being a little more general or abstract, and in containing an unusually high number of pure falsehoods and lies. It’s a curious failing, and may arise from some deep anxiety about a sort of self-treason, as though to admit even to oneself that one’s opinions are distinct from facts might be to undermine them. In any case, for such people the option of trying to exclude their personal opinions from factual accounts is just not available.

I’m not saying John is one of these people, but this inability may be partial and intermittent too. Which may explain his at least temporary confusion about the fact of a fire, say, with a reporter’s opinion (see comment 86), his conflation of “opinion” with “belief” (which presumably would include things like a belief that the sky is blue — see comment 90) and his repeated insistence that the reporter’s opinion can’t be distinguished from his factual accounts except for purposes of “diplomacy” (which, to my ear, sounds like mere camouflage for an underlying agenda pursued in a less open manner).

In any case, not everyone is so limited — most people, I think, including many who are deeply committed to their opinions, are quite able to understand that there is a distinction or at least a spread between those opinions and factual accounts. If such people become reporters they have no conceptual difficulties with the notion that their opinions at least can be kept distinct from their factual accounts — i.e., such “quarantining” doesn’t seem at all “weird” to them (see comment 107), though of course there’s a constant practical need to be careful about doing so. In any case, these people have at least the potential to be reporters in the sense of being honest conveyors of factual accounts, to the best of their ability. The others can only be “reporters”.

I’m using “opinion” in the way most people use it to distinguish it from “fact” — most people, that is, apart from those who for whatever reason are actually unable to so distinguish the two, as I’ve described. Most people, that is, understand that there’s a reason opinions are on op-ed sections, factual accounts are (supposed to be) in the news sections. I.e., I’m simply relying on ordinary intuitions of (most) English-speakers here, and not getting into teasing out various philosophical stances re: belief, truth, reality, knowledge, etc., etc., which, as I’ve said, is an endless pursuit, and not helpful in this context.

But this — “Your objection depends on demanding that reporters assume something more strongly self-undermining: ‘I think x is true but x is false’. ” — is so mistaken that I think you really may be one of those who truly cannot distinguish opinion from fact, so that the only way you’re able to think such a distinction is in factual terms of truth or falsity. That is, you think if someone says “I think Inhofe is a nutcase, but I recognize that’s an opinion, and it’s different from thinking that the sky is blue” then they’re undermining themselves and they really think or are implying that Inhofe is quite sane?!? See #114 above re: anxieties about “self-treason”.

When you say you yourself distinguish opinion from fact you must have some sense of what you mean by the two and of their difference. Let’s just take that.

I don’t doubt that you — or for that matter a high school kid — can quibble endlessly about facts, beliefs about facts, possible facts, opinions about facts, etc., but then, on this level, that’s just kicking up dust. On a practical level, certainly, there are real questions to be decided around these things, but then that gets us right back to where we started, which is the general principle to be used in making those decisions — trying to give as objective account of a situation, dispute, whatever, as possible vs. trying to influence the opinion of one’s audience to coincide with one’s own. Of course, there’s no question about principle and no need to worry about the practical difficulties of distinguishing reporting from op-ed opinionating if you just think that your opinions — e.g., Gore is a nutcase — are facts.

Well, Substance, a “reporter” can do whatever he/she likes. They can, for example, write that the Obama speech on immigration was “dull, unfocused, and confused”, or that Pelosi’s recent briefing on Unemployment Insurance was “ignorant, embarrassing, and economically illiterate” if they (and their editors/producers) want. An actual reporter, on the other hand, would likely provide links or pointers to the full texts involved these days, and then attempt to make a summary that was a little better than partisan school-yard insult.

… so fooling yourself that there is an objective standard of “enough proof” and that therefore anyone on the wrong side of it should just shut up can’t lead to anything good.

Yes, just so. Apply that to AGW and you can begin to see why there remains an issue, why skeptics should not “just shut up”, and why honest reporters, as opposed to agenda-driven opinionators, should report the real state of the controversy, as opposed to their personal opinion of it.

If, by the way, I’ve given the impression that there is a simple binary division between fact and opinion, or even an arbitrary line that can distinguish the two, then I’ve given the wrong impression. There isn’t. I’ve tried on a number of occasions to use words like “spread” or “spectrum” to indicate that there is indeed a continuum separating the two, but I’ll admit that my primary concern has been to be clear that the two are nonetheless distinct, if only as poles. I would also say that the aim of reporting facts, including facts about the range of opinion on an issue, is much more sharply distinguishable from the aim of guiding opinion.

The problem with standing on the fact/opinion distinction and stamping your little foot all day, as though that answered the question, is that what people mean by ‘opinion’, ordinarily, is ‘belief’ but with a strong connotation of ‘that is a bit crappy or doubtful or merely personal in some unspecified way’.

And note how well John illustrates his point about “opinion” with his own opinion about the size of my feet. But maybe John is just projecting his rather defensive sense of his personal opinions onto everyone else. I mean, while I do think many would agree that NY Times editorials, for example, are “a bit crappy or doubtful or merely personal in some unspecified way”, I don’t think everyone would necessarily think so (unfortunately). Similarly, I don’t think you’d get general agreement that all the columnists and opinion pieces that are run on newspaper op-ed pages, for example, are expressing beliefs that are “a bit crappy or doubtful or merely personal in some unspecified way” (though doubtless many are). Are not those opinions? Are they not what “people mean” by “opinion” ordinarily? Is the op-ed — short for opinion-editorial — page then deliberately misleading people by calling them opinions?

Ah, but then, notice that there are apparently “reasonable opinions”, and these are the ones held, or at least reported on, by reporters. Would those be the opinions of reporters who think that Gore is a nutcase, for example, that “climate change” is a huge fraud, that the health care bill is a socialist wedge, etc., etc.? Mmmmmaybe not. Curious, isn’t it? They’re reporters, after all, they’ve (we can but presume) made serious and careful study of the issues, etc., yet now it looks like these are opinions/beliefs we can’t or shouldn’t trust. (This works from either side of the left-right divide, by the way — I’m only presenting it from the left-liberal side, because of the context here.)

Well, if that all starts to look a bit confused it’s probably because it is. Part of the reason for that, I think, is that John’s kind of painted himself into a corner he’d rather not be in, and is now trying to get out of it in various ways, one of them being the time-honored maneuver of watering down or generalizing his position to the point of banality. At times, for example, he seems to want to conflate — or, as he says, make “synonymous” — “opinion” and simple “belief”, so that “the sky is blue” becomes just another example of an opinion; and since everything’s just opinion, reporters can’t help but express opinion or they wouldn’t be able to express anything at all — so much for his claim that he’s always been able to distinguish “fact” and “opinion”, no?

But here’s the bit he wrote in his original post that started this exchange: “… it’s silly to think reporters do not have a positive duty to act on these opinions, changing up their stance to counteract the influence of perceived craziness, the better to help their readers form sensible opinions.” Do you think the “sensible opinions” he wants reporters — reporters, not op-ed writers — to help readers form are simple beliefs, along the lines of “the sky is blue”? Not likely. And “sensible opinions” by definition can’t be the ones that are “a bit crappy” etc. And they probably shouldn’t be opinions like “climate change is a fraud”, either. So I’d say it looks a lot like John started out with a little bit of an agenda of his own, which was to urge, and/or apologize for, reporters expressing their personal opinions (which he’s at least right they no doubt have) as distinct from their facts (and remember that John has always been aware of that distinction), in their reportage — and he’s happy with that because, though it would be impolitic to say so outright, he’s comfortable that the majority of reporters at the present time more or less share his political/ideological bent.

And that’s, as I said early on, certainly a plausible political strategy, if a bit long in the tooth by now: to hell with bourgeois “objectivity”, let’s just make sure — that is, let’s help the people think “correctly”. But, as is so often the case, there are unintended consequences of that approach, such as the spreading understanding among “the people” that they’re not being helped by such reporters, they’re being played, and hence the slow but steady erosion of credibility for such reporters generally, left or right. Not all that attractive a result.

Originally, John said that reporters should write so as to “help people form sensible opinions,” among other things, and I took issue with that, saying that reporters should aim at conveying the objective reality of a situation as far as possible, and “let opinions, like chips, fall where they may.” I took him to mean by “opinion” what everybody means by “opinion” in the context of journalism — i.e., what appears on op-ed pages — and I took his statement about reporters helping people form “sensible opinions” to mean that such opinions should become a part of straight reporting, as distinct from op-ed. The problem, as I saw it, was that the notion of what qualifies as “sensible opinion” has this peculiar tendency to vary along political/ideological battle lines, and you can’t, as John illustrates himself, simply accept what comes out of the mouth or pen of a reporter as “sensible opinion” (“Reporters … are supposed to have reasonable opinions…. That doesn’t mean they do.”). Hence, John’s recommendation, reminiscent of an older notion of reportorial “commitment”, has the effect of enlisting reporters on one side or another of that battle. And that in turn leaves them over time “reporting” only to their own side. Ironically, the focus on forming the audience’s “sensible opinions” actually undercuts the reporter’s ability to communicate with, and hence to help, his audience.

The alternative, which is what I’m recommending, is that reporters qua reporters aim to keep their reports toward the factual end of the spectrum between fact and opinion. This won’t insulate them entirely from the battle, certainly, since the more fervent participants will sweep up everybody anyway, but the attempt to be factual, regardless of opinion, “sensible” or not, will preserve for them a greater degree of independence, and hence credibility with their audience on either side of the political battle lines. Extending the irony above, aiming at an independence from “opinion” in the op-ed sense will actually help reporters’ communication with a larger audience, and would have the — unintended, or un-aimed-for, but still beneficial — effect of helping people form their own opinions (which we have to trust will be “sensible” more or less, however we interpret that word).

Anyway, that’s it folks. I ignored John’s “challenge” since it’s irrelevant, or at least has nothing to do with what I’m talking about. As for the “opinion/belief quibble”, I think it was John that raised it, and I certainly thought he was the one holding on to it for dear life. But, if it’s now my own imagined “death grip” on it that’s the problem — there, I’ve let it go.

The alternative, which is what I’m recommending, is that reporters qua reporters aim to keep their reports toward the factual end of the spectrum between fact and opinion.

But that doesn’t work because people can’t or won’t agree on which reports fall where on the spectrum. I place AGW on the “smelling smoke and inferring fire” end of the spectrum because that’s where I think it belongs based on the evidence, but your (apparent) agenda for the last several dozen comments has been to claim that it belongs more at the “wild speculation” or “sheer personal preference unsupported by any facts” end. (Conveniently, this judgment itself doesn’t call for any factual support. You can dispute the objectivity of someone else’s conclusions on nothing more than your bare word. Now it’s a controversy that reporters should stay out of — wasn’t that easy?)

So what’s a reporter to do when the very degree of objective factuality of his conclusions is itself a political football? Avoiding saying anything that anyone might (even in bad faith) disagree with just gets you pushed around not just by AGW deniers, but by creationists, anti-vaccinationists, and potentially even Holocaust deniers and flat earthers. (I hope you will concede that at least *some* of those positions are unreasonable and their negations do belong on the objective end of the spectrum of fact and opinion — otherwise it may be impossible to have any discourse whatsoever.)

Adherents of discredited positions tend to behave in similar sorts of ways in order to keep adhering to their positions notwithstanding their discredited-ness (including the infamous “epistemic closure” — i.e. not believing a word said by anyone who hasn’t already sworn loyalty to your cause). Some of these behaviors are similar regardless of the subject matter of the discredited position. I don’t think pointing these defense mechanisms out is a cheap tactic — it’s pointing out that one side of the “debate” appears to be sticking to its positions for nonrational reasons, after the point at which rational beings would have admitted their mistakes and changed their minds. That’s clearly relevant to an attempt to distinguish between real controversies between reasonable people interpreting inconclusive evidence, fake controversies invented to muddy the waters, and real controversies in which one side is systematically unreasonable but actually believes what they’re saying.

Indeed, a reporter ought (IMO) to be able to spot people who are clinging to their belief systems for reasons unrelated to evidence, and point them out to his audience, as a helpful sign that there may be less to that debate than meets the eye. Failure or unwillingness to do so is the crux of the “Views Differ on Shape of Earth” criticism — the people who make that criticism (including me) consider it an abdication of the journalist’s responsibility to accurately inform the audience.

@131: Isn’t it funny how True Believers always think, quite sincerely, that the debate is not over as long as they are still standing at the podium? (And that completely irrelevant qualifications like elected office make you a “prominent skeptic” on a scientific issue, who absolutely must be personally convinced before the debate can possibly be considered “over”.)

BTW, “help help I’m being repressed!” is one of those defense-of-the-discredited techniques. Particularly noteworthy is when it is used by people who are not, in fact, under house arrest or something similar — their “persecution” consists *entirely* of having lots of people, or even the vast majority, openly disagree with them and/or attribute their beliefs to irrational motives. The horror!

I’m not saying reporters should expose the people trying to use such language as the closed-minded fanatics they are.

You are, however, saying that they’re “closed-minded fanatics” because they’re willing to draw a conclusion when they’re not the absolute last person on Earth to do so.

I think that your perception of which side of the debate is resorting to “irrational” attacks is, itself, irrational, but that way lies infinite regress. You can’t prove your rationality to someone with a committed a priori belief in your irrationality. (In fact, I don’t think you can prove your rationality at all, even to yourself — some relative of the Incompleteness Theorem. But that may be on a level too arcane to be considered in resolving real-world empirical questions like whether the surface temperature of the Earth is substantially changing over a period of decades, and to what extent human activity is implicated in causing that change.)

In any case, it’s clear that anyone who’s trying to get anti-AGW views “suppressed in the media” is failing — such views are not only not suppressed, they’re positively amplified in the media relative to their standing in the scientific community. (Which, as you point out, is not conclusive — there used to be a consensus against continental drift and many other subsequently-vindicated theories — but they also laughed at Bozo the Clown, and if the professional opinions of scientists in relevant fields aren’t worth *something*, why do we have them?)

Whether this constitutes giving undue weight to a dissenting view that ought to be regarded as a mere fringe (lunatic or otherwise), or splitting the difference between reason and unreason, is a judgment call — so shouldn’t reporters use their judgment? Different reporters’ judgment will of course differ, but ISTM that there’s nothing wrong with that, as long as they’re not all wrong in the same way at the same time (which would most likely require either systematic cognitive bias or conspiracy).

P.S. When, in general, should a debate be shut down and one side declared (by whom?) to have lost? Is it reasonable to shut down debate on the shape of the Earth and call the dissenters irrational? The approximate age? Common descent of Earth lifeforms? Evolution as the principal mechanism of change in those lifeforms? Or should maverick views always be granted respect, regardless of how the majority of observers weigh the evidence for and against them? The general case is relevant to the specific case, and in all of those other historical examples, people went on fighting for their side of the argument long after no rational argument could be made out in support.

If the reporters really are going to act as refs in public debates, then at some point they have to make calls, whether the players or coaches are still arguing over what happened or not. That’s the whole point of the ref analogy, as I understand it.

The real point is that the “ref” analogy is wrong, though in a revealing way — it assumes that there exists a game, with agreed-upon rules, enforced by agreed-upon officials. But that’s not the actual situation. Instead, we have reality, the nature and “rules” of which are in dispute. For some time now, there has been a widespread delusion, to which “intellectuals”, self-styled and otherwise, are particularly susceptible, that it’s possible to access a privileged position looking down on reality, as it were, much as we observe a game — but, alas, that’s just a profound, hubristic error, and when it comes to human reality it’s an error that’s been marked by some terrible consequences in the past century especially.

Of course, if we have to have reporters imitating referees, with some special insight into the “rules” of the real world, then they should at least be on my side of this issue (and others), since that’s the objective side. Right?

Oh, also:

The real point is that the “ref” analogy is wrong, though in a revealing way—it assumes that there exists a game,

(academic research)

with agreed-upon rules,

(peer review, etc)

enforced by agreed-upon officials.

(scientists working in community).

This is not a particularly problematic assumption to be making. In fact, by acknowledging the existence of legitimate debate, you’re acknowledging there exists an underlying structure in which the debate proceeds. It’s not Calvinball. If you didn’t agree to some structure which deems some voices legitimate participants and others illegitimate, you wouldn’t be advising us that debate is ongoing, because it wouldn’t matter to you: you’d recognize the futility of pursuing universal consensus and acknowledge an alternative decision-making process instead.

Instead, we have reality, the nature and “rules” of which are in dispute.

Umm, look, you’re going to get a lot of “Shape of Earth in dispute: opinions differ” type jokes in response to this, and before meta-dismissing them all you might want to think about why folks snicker when they read what you wrote.

It’s not that they hold a diametrically opposite view (in which nature and rules are all settled and we’ve found the unifying equations and ok, let’s go party). It’s that you’re taking a trivial claim (people don’t all agree about reality) and pretending it’s equivalent to a claim we view as wildly irresponsible (we ought to grant credence to a particular group of people whom you support, for particular claims they make involving climate). Classic knitted-forehead troll behavior, by the way.

Of course, if we have to have reporters imitating referees, with some special insight into the “rules” of the real world, then they should at least be on my side of this issue (and others), since that’s the objective side. Right?

Heh. Well, if a bunch of reporters all use their independent judgment and 97% of them side with you (without being told by their bosses to do so, etc.), then I’d at least take a long look at their stated reasons for doing so, if they gave any reasons. Because even though reality is not a democracy, when the consensus of informed people is that one-sided, there is probably something to it. You don’t ordinarily see 97% of people agreeing that the sun rises in the west (although at one time you could have found 97% agreement that the sun circles the earth, so you do have to actually look at the reasons for and against and not just rely on the collective judgment of others).

When a bunch of people all look at the evidence and the vast majority agree on how to interpret it, ISTM that at the very least the burden of proof is on those who want to say that the majority is wrong to explain how and why the majority is wrong, and not just say “Well, I dispute this conclusion for reasons I’m not going to specify, therefore you can’t draw any conclusions without being biased.”

John, normally I wouldn’t jump in (and I deserved that last crack for calling your ideas “silly”: your blog, your rules), but: Are you suggesting that if, say, I said there was a fire in downtown Marlborough a week or two ago (as there was) and in response to your query used the word “belief” to characterize my relationship between my mind and “fire in Marlborough,” the ordinary rules would consider me incompetent to report on the fire? It sounds so absurd. We would have to get computers to report the news instead of people. (In fact, I think we would have to conclude that the people who report the news now are computers.)

Or, say you and I agree that the waterfall method in software development is impossible for projects too large to be assigned in a weekly problem set. However, you believe something on a plane defined by the following axes: the waterfall method requires better education than US developers get, and the computer is crosswise to true reason and to human nature such that rational software development is impossible. I feel pretty comfortable saying you don’t really believe the method is impossible. This example is probably closer to what you have in mind.

John, I’m not sure what Metamorf is proposing. I looked at his blogs, and stopped when I saw he was ridiculing “postmodernism” and “‘French’ theory” in a way common to people of traditional intellectual tastes who are actually too old to have encountered those things at a university, and know about them only what is said about them in the media (because they find the texts too difficult and unfamiliar to read for themselves).

Views differ on shape of Earth.

John gets mixed up about the difference between “constructing a reductio” and simply being absurd. Bianca, I see, believes she has extricated herself from “traditional intellectual tastes”, without realizing the irony implicit in still being mired in “French Theory”. And of course both derive obvious comfort from their surrounding herd of more or less like-thinkers — the “we”. Which is fine and understandable — the world itself must be especially depressing and even frightening for most of the left these days, and they should have a refuge where they’re not bothered by those not included in the group. And that’s why, apart from this final note, I’ve left the conversation.

If, as one parting comment, however, you ask “How do you distinguish which beliefs should and shouldn’t be the basis for reporting?”, and we can stipulate that rational opinions at least, however defined, are allowed, then clearly the beliefs that should be reported are right-wing, as opposed to left-wing, beliefs, with an emphasis on the libertarian as opposed to conservative version. That much at least is obvious, isn’ t it?

@152: Good God, Metamorf, WTF? I am myself too old to have encountered these things at university unless I had been a very intense English lit student, and maybe not even then as an undergraduate. I’m pretty sure postmodernism was known largely as an art-critical and architectural phenomenon then (I remember Ada Louise Huxtable talking to a group of students and explaining, with incredulity, that it even drew inspiration from Barthes, which I thought was spelled Barth). I’m fond of Foucault’s writing, but very aware that my understanding of him is not exactly correct.

And: What is this “should”? Do or do not. There is no “should.” That’s what Yoda would say. Whether that’s good or bad, I can’t always say.

You don’t understand Yoda.