Virginian Pilot: Thank you for endorsing Creign Deeds

The Virginian ^ | 10/28/2009 | Moneyrunner

[moneyrunner]

There is something reliable about things that are consistent. I have often said the something that is reliably wrong is as useful as something that is reliably right.

Just as the public mania for stocks almost always signals a market top, the Virginian Pilot is a reliable guide. If you do the exact opposite of what they advocate in their opinion found in either their editorial (or “news”) pages the odds are heavily in your favor that you are doing the right thing.

By endorsing Creigh Deeds by telling us that he will raise Virginian’s taxes I believe that the electoral blow-out indicated in the polls will be aided by the Pilot’s endorsement.

As a side note, many people have wondered whether the publishing industry is primarily a business or an ideological endeavor. It is often asserted that a paper’s editorial position is bound to offend about half of the public. Now, there are more or less aggressive ways of expressing an editorial position. There is the reasoned approach, and there is the route that the Pilot uses of customarily insulting its readers. This is a function of whom the publisher hires to run the editorial page. Unfortunately for both the shrinking Pilot and its readers, it seems that they can’t get anyone to take the job who isn’t more driven by ideology than reason – or business sense.

What made me think of this was a late poll by Gallup as summarized by Nile Gardiner in of all place the UK Telegraph:

[La Lydia]

The Virginia Pilot is only one of many papers that thinks it is more important to push its own political agenda, into the face of and despite the community it supposedly serves, than it is to report the news accurately. It, too, will discover: BIAS = LAYOFFS.

[TrueKnightGalahad]

This is but further corroboration of what I began, in the early 90's, calling the NYTimes Rule: If one believes the exact opposite of anything* reported in the Times, one's ability to analyse facts and make correct decisions will increase exponentially.

* The Rule formerly allowed exceptions for two areas in which the Times actually reported facts: stock market closing prices and final scores of sporting events. However, as the NYT no longer publishes complete market results, and sports scores are, in the wider scheme of things, completely irrelevant, the cognizable truth of anything published in the paper has approached zero.