Precision, please. Balance, please.

I hate the fact that when I listen to news and talk programs I always have to second guess them as I would a scatterbrained friend who comes to me with a "Did you hear?" story. Im writing at the end of the News Hour and beginning of Charlie Rose and I've just heard a series of statements that are false in various minor aspects, regarding the statement Obama made that people in hard economic times unsurprisingly tend toward bitterness and cling to their religion and so on. Regarding what he said, what it meant, reharding what others said about it. What was particularly frustrating concerning this affair, is that both shows spent good lengths of time debating the parsing of the statement, and then wrap it all up with a paraphrase that adopts a particular, innacurate reading of what was said.

There was a nice piece in the local paper yesterday on the local cold case unit, looking at two cases from 1990. It was all very well done. But it was one of those pieces that assumes at the outset that balance does not matter. It referred to one of the cold cases as having been solved, because someone has confessed to it. That always annoys me because to me, the case is not solved when the prosecutor decides it is, or when the police decide it is, but when someone has been found guilty. The other cold case the article examined still exists as a cold case only because it was not considered solved eighteen years ago when a suspect confessed after a long grueling interrogation. Beyond the individual defendants' perspectives not being included, there was a more general question which the article did not consider: is there a downside to solving these old cases and prosecuting them? Does that mean reopening old wounds? How do you go about defending against a nearly 20-year-old charge? I'm not taking a position, but I think the article did.