That’s not a rhetorical question.\u00a0\u00a0 Do you find the essays and blog posts offered here to be interesting, challenging, and thought-provoking?<\/p>\n
Do you feel welcome to participate and share your ideas and arguments?<\/p>\n
Or does the In Box color the way you hear my reporting when I pivot and offer what is my best attempt at a straight, objective work of journalism?<\/p>\n
These are all questions we’ve wrestled with ever since the In Box launched and became one of the most visited parts of NCPR’s website.<\/p>\n
And it’s obviously a conversation that we’re revisiting in light of the Juan Williams mess.<\/p>\n
Let me say bluntly that I see this as difficult, gray-zone territory for any journalist.<\/p>\n
So I think about it a lot, wrestling with where the lines should be drawn, what’s in and what’s out-of-bounds.<\/p>\n
My goal is to try to offer fact-based analysis, to remain open-minded to good counter-arguments, and to spark interesting conversations.<\/p>\n
And I receive a lot of editorial feedback from my news colleagues at NCPR that shapes where my blog posts go.<\/p>\n
The reason that this all works — in my head, so far — is that I’ve always been a fan of sincere argument and open debate.<\/p>\n
I prefer conversation (and friendships, frankly) with people who disagree with me.<\/p>\n
I love it when people force me to see things in a new way, or prove me wrong, or offer new and provocative facts.<\/p>\n
I also try to come at issues in ways that don’t fall into ideological, left-right grooves, simply because that’s not how my brain works.<\/p>\n
Read through a week of posts and you’ll find me wrestling with public employee unions, with environmentalists, with tea partiers and with government bureaucrats.<\/p>\n
But at the end of the day, there’s no doubt that I sometimes lay out views that some people find contentious, controversial, or just plain loopy.<\/p>\n
So what do you think?\u00a0 Does all this add up to NCPR offering one more cool platform for public discussion and debate?<\/p>\n
Is it a symptom of bias and blather?\u00a0 Something in-between?<\/p>\n
If you could sit in on an editorial meeting to shape how we approach this part of NCPR’s work, what would you tell us?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
That’s not a rhetorical question.\u00a0\u00a0 Do you find the essays and blog posts offered here […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3056"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3056"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3056\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3057,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3056\/revisions\/3057"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3056"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3056"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3056"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}