Month: July 2004

5,000 words in, I should probably start figuring out how this short story ends, huh?

Meanwhile, there’s this story, which at 11,237 words (somehow I though it’d be longer) has moved well out of short story territory and begun to test the waters of whatever the hell it’s now supposed to be.

Writing gets easier, but it never, never gets easy.

Sounds like fuzzy math to me. I know I shouldn’t expect anything better from Fox News — and, for that matter, I shouldn’t be bothering to watch Fox News — but still.

They’re citing some study that says 34% of reporters described themselves as liberal, while only 7% described themselves as conservative. Naturally, they’re drawing all sorts of conclusions about that. (Fox News is always drawing conclusions from things.) A number of people on the panel of shouting heads have pointed out possible problems with the study itself — it asked for self-descriptions rather than positions on particular issues — but nobody seems to be addressing what to me seems a key point: those answers only add up to 41%.

Which means that 59% didn’t describe themselves as liberal or conservative. I could be wrong, but that would seem to indicate that a majority of reporters at least understand the basic idea of objectivity and the danger of bias.

Which is a whole lot more than I can say for Fox. Although maybe somebody on the panel did bring this up, I don’t know. I’ve stopped watching.