Eugene David<br>...The One-Minute Pundit

Posted 5:17 PM by Gene

Oh no, say several attendees of Mr. Mailer's speech in the always reliable Romy LETTERS, it was just COMMON COURTESY. Then up pops this:

I am dismayed that Alan Greenblatt had to go all the way to Cambridge, Mass., to discover that most reporters are liberal in their personal politics. I am also dismayed that he assumes ipso facto that those reporters who harbor liberal sympathies, and who exhibit them in a setting such as a Harvard seminiar, must by definition also harbor a "liberal bias" in their written work. Why is that necessarily so, or even likely? Does he also assume that every journalist of a conservative leaning lets that ideology influence his work? I don't.

Whether a reporter is a liberal or a conservative in the voting booth -- if he or she is any kind of a pro at all -- is just as irrelevant as the question of whether most plumbers or electricians are liberal. So what if they are? Is a good plumber or electrician or reporter going to let his political leanings influence his plumbing? Or his wiring? Or his journalism? Not if he believes in the integrity of the principals of plumbing, or wiring, or reporting, he isn't. That is the rather gaping hole in Greenblatt's logic.

Out of common courtesy I did not paste this into Word to do my ALL-CAPS routine; but the author works for COLUMBIA JERNALISM REVUE, whose plumbing and wiring are SINISTER -- in several senses.