[Still Thinking]

Ah, good point.

In my #7, your question got me going on another facet of the "disinterested third party" phenomenon. In AS, when people describe themselves as "disinterested" the media assumes (1) They ARE disinterested, and (2) That this renders their opinions worthy of consideration and of respect. This is similar to today's assumption that anyone spouting the liberal line is altruistic, while anyone taking the other side is assumed to have sinister motives.

[Publius]

I have seen this myself. When I was working on a rail line sale here in the Seattle area, I ran across letters to the editor protesting the sale supposedly coming from the chairman of the Committee for This or That. No one had ever heard of the committee, and the phone number on the letter belonged to a phone booth at a strip mall.

In the book, the disinterested citizens turned out to be liberal idealogues.

But check the prose that preceded it. All these great names among leftist intellectuals were playing every public relations card they could while insisting that they had nothing to do with public opinion.