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Sunday, December 15, 2013

Just the Facts

It's flabbergasting, really, even after seeing it happen so many times by now, that when polled Americans are revealed to hold demonstrably erroneous views -- about, say, provisions contained in the Affordable Care Act -- the press treats the fact that they hold these views as the relevant fact of the matter, rather than the fact that the views are indeed erroneous or the fact that so many hold erroneous views because Republicans are repeatedly and insistently lying to them. I honestly don't understand why pundits look at poll results that are obviously full of undeniable errors and confusions and then react by gossiping about who is up and who is down as a result rather than, you know, hanging their heads in shame at their own conspicuous failure in their job of informing the public as to the actual facts and stakes of the issues of the day. How do pundits square their refusal to be more than gossip columnists with their obvious sense of their own absolute indispensability to our public life? Frankly, the comparison is unjust to gossip columnists who usually manage -- the successful ones at any rate -- to be funny.

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