Note that Ms. Mapes can't even get her facts straight after all this time. There is no such thing as "peripheral spacing." The analysts at CBS that she speaks of were obviously not from the world of graphic arts, like yours truly, or they would have known that there is no such thing, although there is line spacing, proportional spacing and kerning, all of which one has to know about to be considered competent in the field. And what kind of analysts did she have if they actually thought that there was such a thing? You can judge for yourself.
But this is what makes the Internet and the blogosphere so valuable as a counter to the incompetence and outright bias on display in this short excerpt. People who take an interest in such things, who are also experts in their respective areas, and who are not blinded by liberal-leftist bias are proving to be better analysts than the supposed journalists themselves.
I think that there are a couple of reasons for this. The first and most obvious is left wing bias as everyone on the right side of the debate can see for themselves. I could spend a lot of time writing about that here, but there is another angle that I want to focus on. Just as important in cases such as this is the lack of education we see in today's reporters.
Most journalists go to school to learn journalism. But it's important to note that a degree in journalism does not automatically give one knowledge about any other specialized field. Journalists are, as a rule, specialists only in their own field. If they want to be educated in any other area, such as science or economics for example, they have to make a special effort to go and take those courses as well. Most, of course, don't do so. And whether the reason is intellectual laziness or simple lack of time and money, the results are the same. Add to this the ever present liberal bias at most universities along with an elite rejection of reason and standards of objectivity, and you have a recipe for intellectual blindness and ignorance that is widespread throughout the media. The simple fact is that journalists just don't know much about subjects other than the news business.
If journalists never work in any area other than journalism then they do not pick up extensive knowledge about anything else. Most of the rest of us have a lifetime's worth of experience about our own areas of interest. Sometimes we have knowledge about several areas as we switch from career to career over the course of a lifetime. But reporters don't benefit from this same process as long as they stay firmly rooted to the news business. And it is rare indeed to find people in the news business who have a background in something other than journalism. (And by the way, have you noticed that some of the best bloggers also have some other area of expertise? Charles Johnson is a web designer, the Powerline guys are in law and Hugh Hewitt is a radio host.) News organizations want credentials, which is understandable. But if you have to have a journalism degree in order to get a job at The New York Times or CBS, then the chances are diminished that you will spend time and effort taking unrelated courses in other subjects.
And so a process of self-selection leads reporters away from having any more detailed knowledge about the subjects on which they are supposed to report and lacking the reasoning skills to understand how to ask questions in such a way as to lead to real knowledge rather than the thin pre-packaged boilerplate that is losing the media its audience in larger and larger numbers.
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