Commies and the Wall Street Journal

In Pulp Fiction, Mia says that you can either be an Elvis person or a Beatles person, but you can't be both. I am not sure I buy it with rock and roll, but I don't think anyone would disagree that the same is true for the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times: You are either a Journal person or a Times person, but you can't be both. That is, except for some friends of mine.

By pure happenstance and lack of any real friends, I belong to a certain social club that consists of Underhill, me, and a bunch of geriatric socialists. It provides a few moments of enjoyment and entertainment, but for the most part it is a couple hours wasted every time I attend a meeting. Last night was similar to any meeting until we started talking about the evil war and the awful president. That discussion was no different, it is how we end every meeting, but last night one member mentioned that she was a Wall Street Journal reader. I raised an eyebrow, wondering how anyone is this group would choose a source other than the Old Gray Lady. She automatically qualified her response--of course she found the WSJ's editorial section deplorable and fascist--but she admitted that the WSJ was the only major paper that actually objectively reported news. To be fair, she got back to form quickly when she added that her other "unbiased" sources of news were NPR and a government-controlled Chinese news station she gets on satellite.

I was impressed that she could distinguish NYT news from the NYT editorial section (which, even she admitted, are practically the same thing). Yet I can not understand how someone who admitted (not in these words, of course, it would have broken the socialist code) that NYT news is unreliable, exaggerated quasi-truth, could somehow support it when the same unreliable, exaggerated quasi-truth is written as an editorial.

(Similarly, after an earlier meeting, I had a conversation with a different member who would never stray from the NYT. I asked him if, without choosing which one is right and which one is wrong, he saw any problem with the fact that two papers could give such divergent stories about the same events; if he saw any problem with the fact that one had to be either reporting poorly or blantantly lying. He said that he saw no problem, because he liked the news the Times reported better. Ten minutes of circular argument later, we just had to agree that our worlds contained different news.)

The theme of the club has always been "there is no right or wrong, only each person's opinion which are equally valid and important regardless of what is actually being said", but last night was the closest someone came to saying "I know that X is the truth, but I like Y better so that is what I choose to believe." They hint at it a lot, but last night someone almost admitted it.