Fact v. opinion

Herman Cain, GOP prez. candidate (with little chance of winning), has declared that Obama's refusal to defend the Defense of Marriage Act in federal court is an impeachable offense.



William Broyles wrote an opinion piece for Newsweek comparing Obama to Neville Chamberlain. He was the one who, while Prime Minister of Britain, was desperate to avoid war with Germany. So he acceded to every one of Hitler's demands and got war anyway. Chamberlain eventually realized he was the wrong man to lead Britain and resigned to make room for Churchill.

Broyles says that Obama wants to avoid conflict with the GOP, so accedes to every demand, and is surprised when the GOP ups the ante. According to Broyles Obama should declare he will not run for reelection and give his support to Hillary Clinton, "the leader we should have chosen in the first place."

This is a rare case in which I mentioned an article to my friend and debate partner before writing about it here. Alas, I didn't have the conclusion correct when we talked. Even so, my friend thinks Obama isn't surprised, but knows exactly what is going on when the GOP ups the ante for the next issue.

Both of us think it is significant and important for Newsweek to publish an article like this.

This article ended up at the top of the Newsweek most popular articles when I checked to get the link.



The editorial in Between the Lines from more than a week ago says, "Extremism can't be 'balanced'." Though there are lots of examples out there the one that got BTL's attention was an NPR segment that discussed the "controversy" of gay conversion therapy. This is not a controversy. All respected mental health authorities say conversion therapy does not work and is harmful. So why did NPR call up the crackpots to get a quote in order to "balance" the article? Why did it reclassify a fact as an opinion?

According to BTL, the problem is that NPR felt it didn't have the authority to label extreme views as extreme. NPR is not the only one with this problem. One news source has a hard time being an authority because information is so readily available. The exception is Fox News who claims authority because their ratings are so high. Their ratings are high because they focus on the emotional and don't care about logic or truth. Fox has used its position of high ratings to attack other journalists for being biased, and those attacked cower from the onslaught and give up their authority.