1. Negative Freedom by Stephen Kosnar covers the complex power vacuum/struggle and opportunity after the death of Togo President Gnassingbe Eyadema, and I can't remember the last time I learned so much from an editorial. The author, who lived in Togo as a Peace Corps volunteer before moving to the Triangle, wisely talks about his personal ties to the story just enough to give us a human connection, and then puts his ego aside to tell us what has happened.

Only after he finishes giving us the recent history and developments of the region and the recent public reaction/inaction of the U.S. does Kosnar go into what he thinks this means for the future, and what the US should do about it, in light of our current policy. He could have told us half of this stuff if he only wanted to provide the info needed to support his point of view. The rest is because he knows that most of his U.S. audience lacks expertise on Togo and this could well be the only time many of us will read about it in our lifetimes.

2. Moeser Wrong to Rethink Bell Award by Dan Coleman of The Chapel Hill Herald, is another solid piece of writing that seems to want to educate its readers rather than bark so incessantly that they won't hear contrary evidence. He starts off the same way we all do when approaching a new issue:

Like so many Chapel Hillians, for many years I knew one fact about Cornelia Phillips Spencer: she was "the woman who rang the bell" to signal the reopening of UNC a few years after the Civil War. Southern history being what it is, I was not surprised to learn that there was more to the story.

Then he tells us a story that local readers such as myself have never heard before. If we don't agree with Coleman's conclusions, we can still see how he came to them and appreciate his bringing the story to light. Coleman probably knows that there are at least two sides to every story, and that the best arguments address contrarian viewpoints instead of ignoring them or setting them up as straw-arguments.

3. I finally got interested in the whole blogging as journalism phenomena after reading this article by Peggy Noonan. It interests me not because of what the bloggers have done this time, but who's upset by it. While detailing how facts are balanced in the blogosphere like informational capitalism, Noonan rightly points out how the mainstream media calls bloggers "salivating morons" and "lynch mobs" out of fear and desparation.

But Noonan isn't specific enough. It's not the investigative reporters of the mainstream media who are worried (the people who, you know, actually work for a living). No, it's the pundits who are unwilling to trade in their talking points for a bit of research. They're right to be afraid, because if consumers of news analysis become as ravenous for hard information as they seem to be for personality, then they're gonna need that formal punditry training more than ever.

And the bloggers themselves? They're digging up facts now and--on a smaller scale--actually deserve the audience they get*. If this is their current training ground, then I have an inkling of hope that it could turn into a great upward trend of editorialists hellbent on informing their readers, rather than hellbent on convincing them. Maybe it's already happening and I've given up un mainstream punditry before getting all the facts myself. I'm lazy like that, and I don't have a stomach for reading even the links to columns that people send me.

Friends joke that they get all their news from The Daily Show. I believe they're joking because Jon Stewart is infinitely funnier if you know what he's talking about. Now if they'd told me that The Daily Show is where they get most of their news analysis, then maybe we'd have something in common.

Hopefully this is the most political this journal will ever get.

*Myself excluded. No facts were researched during the writing of this editorial on editorials.

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Posted by: alex at February 21, 2005 12:18 PM