No, it's the truth. Absurd is taking a single sentence of what I wrote and pretending like that was my entire point. Put that in context and you'll understand how it isn't absurd (didn't Joel recently write about that too).
The news is about reporting facts but facts are meaningless without context. Journalists take facts and put them into the proper context so that we don't have to. This isn't a new idea. It's been around for as long as there's been news and while some hacks do it badly and purposely distort the facts it doesn't mean doing it in and of itself is a bad thing.
I stand by what I said. Unless you've got a whole lot of time on your hands it's awful hard to put facts into context the way journalists do. I'm glad they take the work out of it for me because I have a job and I need to eat and I don't have time to play reporter and get my own facts so that I can some pure ideal version of the news. But I still need the news because I need to make informed decisions about things that affect me like where political candidates stand, how the new health care law affects me and if they recalled my car or some toy because the engine spontaneously explodes or the toy has some chemical that's going to kill my kid. I want to hear these things from people whose jobs it is to find out these things and not from Joe Schmoe who works at the local Walmart who read it from a guy who works for the guy that some news is about.
Re: recent health care legislation. I can help you there.
If you gross > $350k/year it is not good for you personally, if you gross <$ 100k a year it is a great law for you personally.
Spend 15 minutes talking to a Canadian, an American without insurance and medical bills, and anybody rich enough to have been able to afford health care at the mayo clinic, and you would discover this.
The meta point I'm trying to make here, is that we would be better served by discovering these things on our own, than into buying the propaganda around "death panels" or believing Obama when he says we won't make you wait in line for health care - both positions advocated by the various mainstream media channels.
The news is about reporting facts but facts are meaningless without context. Journalists take facts and put them into the proper context so that we don't have to. This isn't a new idea. It's been around for as long as there's been news and while some hacks do it badly and purposely distort the facts it doesn't mean doing it in and of itself is a bad thing.
I stand by what I said. Unless you've got a whole lot of time on your hands it's awful hard to put facts into context the way journalists do. I'm glad they take the work out of it for me because I have a job and I need to eat and I don't have time to play reporter and get my own facts so that I can some pure ideal version of the news. But I still need the news because I need to make informed decisions about things that affect me like where political candidates stand, how the new health care law affects me and if they recalled my car or some toy because the engine spontaneously explodes or the toy has some chemical that's going to kill my kid. I want to hear these things from people whose jobs it is to find out these things and not from Joe Schmoe who works at the local Walmart who read it from a guy who works for the guy that some news is about.