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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: tekboy who wrote (30584)	5/24/2002 11:46:37 AM
From: Win Smith	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

But wait a minute. The line on Arafat that Kristof recanted must have been repeated here about a thousand times, by both local posters and in quotations from the legions of bloviating pundits. And I'm sure it'll be repeated a thousand more times in the next year. Kristof may be mainly just a reporter, but you got to put him a cut about the pundit legions at least, and 2 cuts above the local pundit recyclers. And what did JohnM get for posting Kristof's take in #reply-17482400 ? I can't believe you bothered to post Kristof's trifling piece We should, of course, all be off reading FA. By volume, anybody reading this thread gets at least 10 times the exposure to current Israel/neocon bloviating pundit dogma on foreign policy as they do to what FA experts think. Too bad.

To: tekboy who wrote (30584)	5/24/2002 12:29:16 PM
From: Ilaine	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

After reading this thread for a while, and the in-depth articles that have been linked here, I don't read newspapers for anything but news and soft stuff (comics, recipes, shopping, entertainment) anymore. George Will and Safire and the like cannot compare to Foreign Affairs and its ilk when it comes to the complex situations in the world. They waste my valuable time. I glance occasionally at columnists when they talk about domestic matters, or guest columnists talking about something within their area of expertise. Keep up the good work!

To: tekboy who wrote (30584)	5/24/2002 1:32:08 PM
From: JohnM	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

Tek, on the Kristof column and on columnists in general, as you know, I'm not particularly enamored of his columns. And I have my favorites and not so favorites. But I count on them to fulfill precisely the role that bothers you, which is the role of the generalist, who consults the specialists and writes something readable and accessible. I don't have the time nor the interest nor the resources to check out the specialists on a given issue, nor to read them often enough to know their particular takes on things. Thus, I count on Kristof, Friedman, etc. to do that for me. If I learn one of them is not doing it well, I read that one a bit more skeptically and if it continues I begin to skip and if it continues I simply ignore them. I can understand your frustration. I've read some columnists writing on sociology and it's pretty bad. They not only get it all wrong; they tend to get whatever their sources tell them all wrong. But, frankly, I don't have any choice in the matter. Unless you have a better idea.