Leonard Pitts The Miami Herald

November 10, 2010

Leonard Pitts
The Miami Herald
One Herald Plaza
Miami, FL 33132-1693

RE: “The Media’s Credibility is Priceless” – Yet again more proof that Gresham’s Law is not limited to money. A take on your column in today’s Miami Herald.

Mr. Pitts,

Once again I am in your debt.

If I read your column correctly you are telling me – I think, I think – that it’s OK to listen to NPR if I have a discrete barf bag nearby. Of course, you didn’t mention NPR but your major premise – journalistic objectivity, hard to define, is so subjective that your proud pennant is plaid – grants me a literary “letter of marquee and reprisal” to pursue brigands and villains wherever they may be secreted.

Your two examples – Breitbart and Olberman – are confusing.

Breitbart enjoys turning over a rock and discovering and disclosing what modern American Liberals do when they think no one is looking

Olberman has anointed himself the keeper of the sacred seals of modern American Liberalism. As such he is able to issue journalistic fatwas against those contemptible rotters who wander beyond the pale of progressive public policy.

That was pretty objective, right?

[Has it been 6 years since Dan Rather objectively said “So what if the story was made up? It fits my narrative.”]

By the by, do you know if Jesse Helms died of AIDS?

If he did would you tell Nina Totenberg? She is the NPR horse faced horse’s ass, a true paragon of progressive political propriety. She also wanted his grandchildren to die in a most agonizing manner. She is a true paragon of progressive political propriety. What a sweetheart she is!

Does she qualify for the blanket amnesty that modern American Liberals extend to their own?







A personal note.

I made it to the round of 16 in a murder trial ion New Jersey. New Jersey sits at least 14 for a jury trial. At the end 12 names are picked. The pool was down to 16.

The defendant, the “alleged perpetrator” if you will, was Black. He was wearing a well tailored 3 piece red suit. His nickname was “The Worm”.

Both sides kept asking the same question.

“Are you prejudiced?”

The answers would suggest that the followers of Saint Francis of Assisi and Gandhi had joined forces that day to cause the jury pool to overflow.

I said that I was the sum total of all my biases and prejudices. I said that I believed that it would not prevent me from rendering a just verdict.

My neck still hurts from the hook that yanked me out of the jury box and dumped me into the parking lot

Objectivity is like fairness. It is also like truth, beauty, justice, and equity. It lies in the eye of the beholder.

I am reminded of what Justice Stewart said about pornography. He couldn’t define it but he knew it when he saw it.

Was Gwen Ifill “objective” or, in your words, “disinterested” when she interviewed President-elect Obama without disclosing that she had written a laudatory book about him that was soon to be published?

How would you characterize the tumescent tingle running up the restless leg of Chris Matthews? If he had a picture hanging from his bathroom wall of the President emerging from the surf would that cloud your judgment of him? Would that cloud his judgment of him?

It seems that objectivity is like the horizon. It’s there but we can never quite get there. I daresay that the quest is Sisyphean in that Utopia means nowhere.






You mention, “objectively” of course, that Breitbart had “two video hit jobs [Shirley Sherrod and ACORN]”.

Would not objective fairness demand that you include the fact that it was the post-racial Obama administration that fired her? Wouldn’t their caving into a “bitter gun clinging” troglodyte warrant a bigger story?

If ACORN had been more sinned against than sinning why have they gone to ground? Are they awaiting the next large cash transfusion from George Soros so they can reemerge with new identities?

Did not the President tell us the oceans would begin to recede once his investiture was completed? Today I am told that the oceans are rising. Is it too late to blame the Republicans for that clusterflub?

Objectivity?

Honesty?

Mutually exclusive or synonymous?






Kevin Smith