Facts Not Worth Reporting

I don't like reposting others' works in their entirety, but sometimes it's the only way to really get the point across. Furthermore, I know from looking at my blog stats that most visitors don't bother clicking over to the original source, and this is too important a point to allow it to pass without notice. Krugman's blog:

Long ago I said that if liberals said the Earth was round, while conservatives said it was flat, the news headlines would read “Shape of the planet: both sides have a point.” But I encountered a new wrinkle today.

I was tentatively scheduled to be on a broadcast dealing with — well, I won’t embarrass them. But first they had to find someone to take the opposite view. And it turned out that they couldn’t — which led to canceling the whole segment.

In a way this goes beyond my original point, which was the unwillingness of the news media to referee a controversy by actually reporting the facts. Now it seems that a fact isn’t worth reporting unless someone is prepared to deny it.