I'm looking for reader input on whether and when New York Times news reporters should challenge "facts" that are asserted by newsmakers they write about.
But -- no joke -- I'm going to look on the bright side. Apparently naive questions can often be the start of quite penetrating and profound explorations. Think of Yogi Berra; think of Peter Falk's "just one more thing.." throwaway queries on Colombo; think of children asking "Daddy, am I going to die?" or "Why is those people's skin a different color from mine?" Sometimes it's only the plainness of a non-sophisticated query that allows people to talk about issues that are usually taken for granted.
So I think Brisbane deserves credit rather than ridicule for raising this question. Let's hope that within the Times, and elsewhere, it's one more reason to focus attention on the difficult daily choices facing journalists trained to be "fair" and "objective" in the new political-infosphere terrain. (And, yes, I realize that these choices are difficult -- there's a whole book [ http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN=0679758569 ] on the topic!) __
It didn't note that Rep. Cantor's main political function over the past year, and the main source of his tension with Speaker John Boehner, has been precisely to add "confusion and uncertainty" to politics, toward the end of overthrowing what he considers corrupt old bipartisan business-as-usual. During the debt-ceiling showdown, he was a major proponent [ http://www.salon.com/2011/06/23/eric_cantor_tax_hike_hissy_fit/ ] of risking a default if he didn't get the spending cuts he wanted. You can admire his brinkmanship or deplore it, but either way it deserves mention when he talks about "uncertainty." A "truth vigilante" would point it out.
[For the record: I've never been an NPR employee but over the years have appeared on various programs, in recent years Weekend All Things Considered.]
I finished up Middlemarch [ http://www.princeton.edu/~batke/eliot/middle/ ] two days ago, and had a good debate about it on Twitter. Ultimately I found the book shockingly ambitious and ultimately disappointing. Those two notions are connected, and I'll have more on that later.
From the time when the exercise of the intellect became the source of strength and of wealth, it is impossible not to consider every addition to science, every fresh truth, and every new idea as a germ of power placed within the reach of the people. Poetry, eloquence, and memory, the grace of wit, the glow of imagination, the depth of thought, and all the gifts which are bestowed by Providence with an equal hand, turned to the advantage of the democracy; and even when they were in the possession of its adversaries they still served its cause by throwing into relief the natural greatness of man; its conquests spread, therefore, with those of civilization and knowledge, and literature became an arsenal where the poorest and the weakest could always find weapons to their hand.
The modernism evinced here, and the sense of inevitable progress, is an obvious target. And yet so much of this calls back to both Malcolm and Douglass's resolve to educate himself, to that old African-American sense that there is [something] covert and belligerent about the life of an autodidact, that to be ignorant is to do the work of one's enemies.
Tocqueville quotes the Puritans motives for enforcing public education:
Whereas," says the law, "Satan, the enemy of mankind, finds his strongest weapons in the ignorance of men, and whereas it is important that the wisdom of our fathers shall not remain buried in their tombs, and whereas the education of children is one of the prime concerns of the state, with the aid of the Lord...."