World's dumbest columnist reflux

So, as I was fixing to say, Cal Thomas appears to be auditioning to take over Joseph Perkins' title as World's Dumbest Syndicated Columnist. In this column, which appeared this week in the Gazette, Thomas belittles the Project for Excellence in Journalism for reporting that opinions sometimes infiltrate news reports. As he so often does, Thomas totally misses the point.

Thomas notes, correctly, that his employer, Fox News, was singled out for opinionated coverage. As the project's annual report on the news media put it, "On Fox News, the journalists themselves offer their opinions, without attribution to any reporting, in seven out of ten stories. That happens in less than one story out of ten on CNN, and in fewer than three stories out of ten on MSNBC."

As the report makes clear, the point of the study wasn't to determine whether opinions exist in journalism. It was to measure the extent of those opinions as systematically as possible. Such studies inevitably require some subjective judgments, and independent thinkers should be skeptical and critical of them.

Thomas' response? He ignores the evidence. He doesn't even defend Fox's reporting. Instead, he cites a few anecdotal examples of what he considers opinion on other news networks. He concludes, "If they had been truly reporting and not indoctrinating, there would be no Fox and no bloggers to study." He doesn't even bother to try to explain why viewers who are turned off by "indoctrination" would therefore turn on the network that features the most indoctrination.

In short, he responds with clueless drivel. Joseph Perkins must be turning over in his hammock.