"Eyes Pop Out"

I do wonder sometimes what goes through the minds of many journalists. Take this Wells bit, f'r instance. I can understand why a journo-slash-columnist would applaud anybody who increases the number of eyeballs running over the pages of the site (or newspaper, or magazine) that he writes for. Perfectly understandable.

But, at some point, doesn't credibility come into it? Doesn't said journalist-slash-columnist say "wait a minute. This guy is demonstrably full of shit and inclined towards a little light race-baiting besides. Perhaps there's a good reason why people are pissed off at him?"

Yeah, you don't generally say that your fellow columnists are full of shit--though if you're at the NY Times, you might hint at it--but you can certainly do better than chattering excitedly about "a columnist who excites the right while making the left's eyes pop out". Augusto Pinochet did the same damned thing in his time, too, but if I were a managing editor circa 1994 I wouldn't be giving him a column either.

Weird, too, because lately Wells has been pretty good. Guess it's some odd Canadian variant of the whole Village thing, where no matter where they stand, you praise the "insiders" because you identify with them. Or maybe he just believes that credibility is unimportant as long as you have an equal amount of right-wingers and left-wingers attacking you. And that's just stupid. Contradicting people saying the sky is blue by insisting that it's red doesn't make the damned thing purple, now, does it?