Unproductive media criticism at ColoradoPeakPolitics.org
I’m hoping ColoradoPeakPolitics succeeds at being an intelligent blog on the right, like ColoradoPols is on the left.
It’s off to a decent start, with writing that keeps you awake, but its recent critique of a blog post of mine displayed media criticism at its worst, long on platitudes and short on specifics.
My post provided evidence that the The Denver Post opinion page is more ideologically balanced now, at least in terms of in-house columnists, with David Harsanyi gone. I counted columns by Post columnists and proved this.
ColoradoPeakPolitics acknowledged my diligent work with an “abacus,” thanks very much, but didn’t refute my numbers. The best it could come up with was an irrelevant statement that more journalists give money to Democrats than the GOP, which is irrelevant because my focus was on opinion columnists who aren’t trying to be fair anyway. (In fact, it also doesn’t matter whom journalists give money to. It’s their writing, their product, that matters, and there’s no study showing news bias at The Denver Post.)
Then ColoradoPeakPolitics wrote that I left out the editorials, which are “overwhelmingly liberal.” That’s funny, because I said they were right-leaning. And Post Editorial Page Editor Dan Haley, in his response to my blog post, defended them as centrist.
I had to acknowledge that I really didn’t know which direction The Post’s editorials lean generally. I wrote I’d do a deeper bean count later, over a defined period of time like maybe six months, to determine if the newspaper’s editorials lean left or right. My view was just an impression, like that of ColoradoPeakPolitics. Impressions make bad media criticism, so I’ll try to get some data on the table that we can all debate in a meaningful way.
I’d suggest to ColoradoPeakPolitics that we do this analysis together but the unfortunate anonymity of ColoradoPeakPolitics precludes this.
ColoradoPeakPolitics went on to say I was using “fuzzy math” but at least I showed my work.
Then it concluded that Haley wasn’t buying my argument that a new Harsanyi was not needed. But what does ColoradoPeakPolitics think of Haley’s comment: “Locally, as of next week, we will have two main op-ed columnists (Carroll/Littwin) who will write 12 columns a month from the right and left. That’s balance.”
Agreed.
So, dear ColoradoPeakPolitics, it’s great to have you around but please, if you’re going to be a media critic, slow down and try to be more specific and focused. Then we can have a productive discussion, like you might find on ColoradoPols.