Journalists share a fundamental belief: Information solves more problems than it creates. In keeping with this view, most newspapers favor transparency in government and open communication among citizens.
The Internet gives us plenty of tools for fostering transparency and spurring communication. In the wide-open digital frontier, people from anywhere can send us messages about anything that’s on their minds.
Newspaper reporters and editors usually learn to absorb the hard knocks. But we never get over the disappointment when efforts at civil discourse crash and burn.
For instance …
On Saturday, our blog-style column, The Buzz, indulged in fanciful speculation about Gov. Sarah Palin’s sudden resignation. And it led to this exchange with a Heraldnet.com reader who identified himself as a Scottsdale, Ariz., resident:
E-mail from Scottsdale: You are a typical Seattle left wing hack, proven by you lowly comments on the front page on 7/4/2009. Have you ever bashed a dem like this? What about the WA gov gregorie that has ran this state into an $8,000,000,000 deficit?
Response from an editor on the Herald’s news desk: I’ll try and fill you in on what we try to do with The Buzz. It’s a daily feature that we try to have a little fun with. We pick three or so stories from the day’s paper, could be local, could be national or international, and try to find something humorous in it.
Not everyone is going to agree that it’s either fair or funny, but we try to take broad aim, particularly at political figures. So, yes, we’ve made light of plenty of Democrats, including, but not limited to Blagojevich, Edwards, both Clintons, Biden and even Obama. And while I wouldn’t hold Gregoire solely to blame for the state’s budget problems anymore than I would blame Schwarzenegger for California’s, we’ve aimed at the budget headaches and Gregoire in the past.
You’re free, of course, not to find what we write to be fair comment, or even funny. But I wanted to assure you that our particular targets are determined only by who is in the news that day.
Thanks for reading, and enjoy your summer.
Reply from Scottsdale: Thanks for the update, not being from the area I wasn’t sure if the Herald was infested with liberals like the Seattle times and the rag PI that went belly up.
As far as Gregorie goes she has had control of the spending here for two terms and couldn’t control it.
I thank god that we in AZ got rid of janet napom known Jano. She only over spent the state budget by $2 billion. Seems like female left wing dem gov’s like gregorie and jano can’t seem to run things. The only good thing about gregorie is that she is not a lezbo like jano.
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