Response to comments on Soelberg's blog

The end of BYU's semester and my moving to Florida have seriously interrupted my posting and reading habits, so I didn't see this post until just now. In response to Brad, I don't mean to suggest that non-mainstream sources are always wrong. I am a frequent reader/viewer of several non-mainstream outlets (fair.org, Democracy Now!, Huffington Post, rawstory.com, to name some). I merely observed that these sources are highly slanted and that they should be with a very critical eye, especially when the claim seems outrageous or unbelievable.

Fringe groups are valuable. I don't mean to use the term in a derogatory light. I'm making a positive observation, not a normative statement of any kind. The groups I mentioned are "deviant" in the sense of being what my Stats professor used to say "a couple standard deviations away from the mean." For example, I feel I came to the correct conclusions about the Iraq war from the beginning partially because I checked out sources I found in the fair.org "Counter Spin" column.

My feelings about the specific personalities (Moore, Klein, Hannity, etc.) I named are the same as I stated before. Any individual (who isn't running a serious political campaign) who actively courts groupies is immediately to be suspected of being a hack whose opinion should be ignored unless they are quoting someone with credentials.