Friday, March 23, 2012

James Taranto Bitch Slaps Linda Greenhouse

I read only the first paragraph of Linda Greenhouse's ObamaCare essay last night:
Journalistic convention requires that when there are two identifiable sides to a story, each side gets its say, in neutral fashion, without the writer’s thumb on the scale. This rule presents a challenge when one side of a controversy obviously lacks merit. But mainstream journalism has learned to navigate those challenges, choosing evolution over “intelligent design,” for example, and treating climate change naysayers as cranks.
That passage combines so much condescension and anti-intellectualism it's almost funny, but the primary effect of Greenhouse's idiocy was to have me click the back button to find something else to read. So imagine the laugh I got this morning seeing James Taranto go after Greenhouse with a well-deserved bitch slap. See: "The Ineffective Greenhouse" (via Memeorandum).

Just read it at the link. Taranto is reasonable, and frankly tentative, in his commentary, a sign of someone willing to consider possible outcomes that differ from his ideological preferences.

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