I got mentioned in the alt-weekly Westword
http://blogs.westword.com/...
Columnists are supposed to write provocatively -- to express themselves in ways that force readers to take notice and think. But do such scribes get more leeway than Internet surfers posting comments on newspaper websites? To find out, a blogger conducted an experiment focusing on "Full-Blooded Americans Get a Vote," a recent column by Kathleen Parker (pictured), and the Denver Post, one of many papers to publish it -- and he thinks the results show that the average person is more closely monitored than are the pros.
I only posted part of this blog post because it's not my blog, but here's more (click on the link to see the screenshots):
http://www.mercenaryscookbook.com/...
You’ve probably seen the many links throughout the blogosphere to Kathleen Parker’s editorial,"Getting Bubba",in which she says Obama can’t relate to white people, not because of race, but his impure blood, lack of "heritage", "roots", "bloodlines" and "blood-equity". This despite the fact that Obama is related to Cheney, with a grandfather who fought in WWII, and McCain was born in Panama. Makes one wonder what exactly has polluted Obama’s veins, doesn’t it?
Now, I have been familiar with Parker for some time. One of my first forays into blogging involved writing her editors when she had changed a direct quote from a supposed contact in Iraq (Buzzflash originally broke the story). Then, she lied about informing her editors about the quote change to spin herself out of it. I had always consoled myself in the fact that this was an Ann Coulter wannabe whom no one knew about. I would see her name pop up over the years, but it wasn’t until this week that I realized she is one of David Broder’s colleagues at the Washington Post Writer’s Group. In the opinion of our elite editors, she is one of our great thinkers.
The common complaint about an editorial like "Getting Bubba" is that a paper with editors ought to have standards. Not high ones, but it should have them. You can have an opinion, but not about the roundness of the Earth. Besides, any paper is valuable media real estate, and the opinion pages some of the most coveted. What you choose says something about what a paper values. When you choose to publish a story on say, Holocaust denial, you are saying of all the columns that come your way, this, in your judgement, this is the cream of the cream. So I decided to try a little experiment.
In comments, we unwashed masses are often asked to agree to certain terms of civility. These are the ground rules at the Denver Post, one of the papers who ran Parker’s column: