Posted by
Andrews on Wednesday, November 04, 2009 10:37:55 AM
I hate to admit it, but recently I have been so busy I have not read one word written by the professional pundits on TH. For that matter, I have just barely kept up on headlines. But, last night, after falling asleep at my desk and waking at 4 AM, I had a few quiet minutes, so I decided to check out what the professionals had written, and was surprised to see that several were writing on topics I touch on regularly.
For example,
John Stossel wrote a piece on media bias which hit upon several favorite topics of mine. First, his description of the attitude with which he entered the news agrees perfectly with my theory that journalism students self-select form a "save the world", left-leaning bias, as described in "
Some Thoughts on the Media". Then his belief that all news is inherently biased agrees well with my post "
The Death of Impartial Media". And, given that, overall I think Mr. Stossel would probably have no objection to the suggestions I made in "
The Impossibility of Unbiased Reporting" and "
Media Double Standards and a Proposed Solution", simply giving up on trying to create an unbiased media, accept the bias, and simply have competing media outlets, each open about its bias.
Then we come to
Thomas Sowell, a man with whom I almost always agree. And in this case that is quite true, as he was addressing a question I often take up, medical reform. He first mentions something I brought up in "
High Cost of Medical Care" and "
Medical Reform, An Overview" the fact that medicine costs what it costs, regardless of reason, so "reforms" are simply going to mean less of it. He then follows reasoning similar to my post "
Who Will Decide" and argues that reform will basically mean less care.
There were a few others, but those two were the ones closest to my writing. Not that I am claiming any sort of superior insight as I happened to hit upon the same topics and perspectives of two pundits. No, I am simply happy to see that my thought is not that far outside the mainstream. Sometimes I worry that I am on the fringe of conservative thought, especially when I start talking about privatizing roads or eliminating medical licensing or doing away with public education and I get either no response or rather unsympathetic responses. So it is nice to find that, one some topics at least, I am well within the mainstream of thought on the right. At least as much as Thomas Sowell or John Stossel are.
POSTSCRIPT
For my regular readers, yes, this would normally have been a "John Stossel Imitates Me" or "Thomas Sowell Imitates Me" post, but, as I haven't read their columns in so very long I was surprised at how mainstream my thoughts turned out to be. Mentioning that surprise seemed more important than adding yet one more installment in a long running joke (see "
Best of the Web Imitates Me XXI"). So, for once, I spared them the facetious accusations of plagiarism.