The Blog...thoughts about the odds and ends of life

"Everybody's got a blog," I'm told. Well, yeah, ok. Me too, now. So why? Well, let's see. I was a reporter for decades and, despite what many people say about reporters - or "newsman" - as I was called then, I had no agenda. Facts were facts and every statement came with an attribution and that was the end of it. Straight, no gingerbread reporting. "There was a fire on 9th Street, the fire department put it out, no one was hurt." Stuff like that.

I covered Congress for a while and that was a bit trickier because everyone came at you with a political agenda and lying to reporters was considered an art form, at least for some Members and their staffs. There were exceptions of course. Like the sitting Senator whom I interviewed shortly before an election who told me over a glass of scotch that he was going to lose. Off the record, of course. He did. The polls showed it to be a tight race. It wasn't and he knew it.

Most reporters work their butts off to scrape every last bit of fact and truth off the floor and try to make sense of it. Here's the truth as I see it. People complain about bias in the press when what they read, see or hear doesn't conform to their own biases. We all have beliefs and sometimes we stick with them even in the face of hard evidence that we're wrong.

We see that today in the dizzying piles of information that comes at usd from everywhere. Overpaid bloviating gasbags on cable sit around tables and opine about everything whether they know anything or not. Numb viewers stare at the screens and pretend to themselves that these gasbags are knowledgeable. They're not any more informed than a random drunk on a bus who loudly announces "It's all a bunch of crap!"

Maybe it is. Let's continue this in later entries. Until then, read real books and stay away from cable news.