I'm two-thirds of the way with Reynolds on this one -- who wants more sloppy, superficial journalism? That's what I read blogs for! Where we part company, however, is on the matter of bias -- I think biased journalism is at least as valuable as "objective" journalism, and maybe even objective journalism -- if you spend all your time covering a specific subject and you don't even have an opinion about it, how interested can you really be in what you're doing? In the end, it's pretty hard to decouple bias from engagement -- why not let journalists write what they think, and put the burden of providing "balance" on readers? Journalistic objectivity is in large part a business-driven value, arising out of a quest for market-share and a desire to create a climate that's friendly to advertisers: if you don't take an opinion on anything, you can potentially appeal to everyone, or at least not piss anyone off. That works for monopoly newspapers, but on cable and the web it has less efficacy, as those realms are all about aggregating highly targeted groups of people. There, bias is a business virtue, which is good news for news media, because bias can also be a journalistic virtue.

As for Comrade Reynolds himself, I can't help but think of the old canard, "Big Education bon vivant, heal thyself!"

Indeed, Instapundit.com is a bustling factory of sloppiness and superficiality. Comrade Reynolds isn't dumb, and I'm not sure he's even willfully deceitful -- he just thinks so fast his analyses often outrun the facts. And thus hardly a day passes at Instapundit.com without some facile take on something or other; my recent favorite was this post about Aimee Mann: "AIMEE MANN is making all the songs from her new CD available for free on the web. Funny, the RIAA says that artists will lose money doing this. What can she be thinking? Maybe that the RIAA doesn't know what it's doing?"