Op-Eds&CO.

[Terrance]

My belief is that if an op-ed or column does not greatly upset a
substantial number of people, the author has wasted the space. This is
particularly true in economics, where many people have strong views and
rather fewer have taken the trouble to think those views through - so
that simply insisting on being clear-headed about an issue is usually
enough to enrage many if not most of your readers. 

	--Paul Krugman--

Paul Krugman has an op-ed in Friday's  NYT. It sucks. It's not
upsetting.
It's not humorous. Paul is wasting space. Why? Paul is a serious 
economist and he would never write such nonsense in one of his books or
in a serious article on economics. It's an op-ed. Most of us read these
things. They take little thought and they can be amusing. But we can't
read too many of them just as we can't read comics all day long. Unless
of course it's our job to read them or deliver them or whatever. 

I wonder about all this op-eding and on-line journalism and the internet
and I think that the Drudging of stories is not good for us. Everyone
has sources unknown and secret and people seem to be cutting and pasting
speculations and rumors and calling it journalism. It's troublesome. I
wonder too about how the online journalist, relying on on-line or
cyberspace or Baedekered realities is the worst kind of tourist. Tom
Friedman (like him or not) writes Op-Eds and books. He writes about the
Middle East for the most part. He lived and worked there for a long
time. You can read Friedman and know that he's lived there. But if
you've never been to Brazil how can you write about it. Well, as readers
of Pynchon we all know you can write wonderful fiction about places
you've never been, but journalism is supposed to be more real. And there
is something incestuous about the press and the way they talk about
themselves. This one reported this many people and that one reported
that his one reported and so on. Can't anyone give us the facts? Facts
are not newsworthy I guess, but neither is naked pamphleteering and
cyber googled on-line journalism.