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Politics : View from the Center and Left -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: JohnM who wrote (25011)	7/24/2006 8:35:07 PM
From: Ilaine	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 542785

I'm joining Dale's side of the argument that what he calls partisanship is compatible with strong commitments to narrative accuracy. I agree but also agree with Lane3 that "warplanes" calls up different images than "planes", etc. And with Thomas M.'s larger point, that if you sympathized with Hezbollah you wouldn't say that the Israelis were retaliating for kidnapping their soldiers, you'd say it in a way that didn't imply that Israel was responding to provocation. Even the stories you choose to tell are evidence of selection bias -- the brave soldier or the orphaned children. Fox is overtly partisan but the "balance" comes from telling part of the story that you won't read elsewhere (and you personally are not interested in, anyway). Their audience wants that bias, and doesn't like yours, which you knew. Real historians prefer not to rely on newspaper stories, which are generally considered to be unreliable sources, at least as sources of "what happened" in a narrative event which occurs in a charged arena. They're OK for stuff like whether it rained or not. Lane3's plain vanilla governmental fact finding is generally considered more reliable, especially when it's about routine matters. But some governments lie (remember counting dead Viet Cong). In fact, the US park police no longer estimate the size of protests in DC, because those numbers are too politically charged for one side or the other.