Opinion: Susan Jacoby bemoans something about political information

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We thought at first there was a very interesting opinion piece elsewhere on this website today by Susan Jacoby, the author of ‘The Age of American Unreason.’

The headline -- ‘Talking to ourselves’ -- was intriguing because that’s what bloggers do in the darkened early hours of the day as this is written. It’s hard for political bloggers to get in a word edgewise during daylight because of all the posters leaving comments -- more than 31,000 here in recent times -- about politics and some other things.

Of course, as recent days have shown, virtually all Ticket commentors love The Ticket writers, think they’re well-meaning, from legitimate families, hardworking humans whose perspectives they value and probably even treasure.

And even if on the odd occasion a reader arrives at The Ticket with his/her own personal perspective because of some stupid education or bizarre outside influence, after reading a few Ticket items virtually everyone leaves agreeing with almost every word published here. You can see that uniform unanimity reflected in recent comments.

So we were struck by the first 44 words of Jacoby’s treatise:

‘As dumbness has been defined downward in American public life during the last two decades, one of the most important and frequently overlooked culprits is the public’s increasing reluctance to give a fair hearing -- or any hearing at all -- to opposing points of view.’

Her article is only two paragraphs long, albeit probably the two longest paragraphs in the history of LATimes.com. (UPDATE: Because of the vast power and influence of The Ticket, as soon as this was posted, our efficient web colleagues fixed that typographical problem and ruined the joke.)

But in those 50,000 or whatever words she says a whole bunch of what initially seemed like good stuff.

She argues basically that as the sources of information and methods of distributing it have expanded exponentially in recent years -- cable channels, websites, blogs and the rechargeable gizmos to receive them -- Americans, ironically, have closed themselves off more from info diversity. Avoided places and people that disagree with them. And gravitated almost exclusively to information sources that agree with them.

She calls it a ‘militant parochialism.’

That’s total rubbish! Couldn’t disagree more. She probably lives in her car. So we stopped reading that stupid article. Came back home here where we agree with virtually everything we write.

--Andrew Malcolm