October 23, 2004
Bias Alert
Here's a moderately interesting article on Slate about the author's experience infiltrating Red and Blue zones flashing the wrong colors. It's a good idea, but the application is flawed. He visits only two places in "Red America," neither of which are outlandishly so, but goes to numerous liberal spots, most of which are guaranteed to be full of almost militant liberals. Furthermore, he spends only 403 words on the forays into GOP-land, but 1082 on his Democrat invasions. If he wanted a true test, he should have worn some of his Kerry/Edwards garb in a few Deep South small towns. As the article's written, I got the distinct impression that it was purposefully structured to show the liberals in a bad light. Either this "journalist" is an incompetent hack or an obvious partisan (not that the two are mutually exclusive).
Mallarme:
Aren't you really preening the left leaning Slate? Perhaps the piece was deliberately designed to broaden the audience at Slate a la Ludwig's press-bias-equals-market-forces argument.
I'm not sure what you mean by "preening" in this context, but I doubt the article is an attempt to draw in more readers. I think it's just an example of a poorly executed idea.