Opinion: Top 10 opinion items of last week
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As measured by visits to the website, between Aug. 17-23:
1) Death by numbers, by Meghan Daum.
2) Not so fast, Christian soldiers, by Michael L. Weinstein and Reza Aslan.
3) The journalism that bloggers actually do, by Jay Rosen.
4) The misleading Vietnam analogy; Editorial.
5) Stonehenges all around us, by Craig Childs (from Feb. 16, 2007).
6) Blogs: All the noise that fits, by Michael Skube.
7) Debates that say something, by Newt Gingrich.
8) ‘Sanctuary’ as battleground, by Ronald Brownstein.
9) Drunk on ethanol; Editorial.
10) The lost Padilla verdict, by Stephen Vladeck.
What were they saying about last week’s #1, Meghan Daum’s meditation on the hierarchy of death? A selection from the reaction.
Stan Larson: ‘The recent mining accident provides a great segway for my second beef with cable news. I’m so fed up with local tragedies absorbing all of the national news airtime. It’s not that I don’t care. It’s just that I know there are thousands of tragedies unfolding around the world every day, many with much greater human consequences than the events the media chooses for us. Why do we allow the media to pick a tragedy for us, and then beat it into the ground until ratings start to drop, before serving us a new tragedy. Do they use focus groups to select the most interesting calamity? Better yet, why don’t we point the media spotlight on looming tragedies that can be avoided or mitigated.’
Prince Lackadasia: ‘In every American city I’ve ever lived, a murdered white suburbanite is worth more in column inches and air time than any three black inner city bodies. And the disparity between our interest in the fate of Americans and the nameless hordes of dark-skinned suffering others is simply obscene. Roughly 3000 children die every day of malaria in the developing world, most of them in sub-Saharan Africa, with hardly a flicker of attention in the news.’
noahnoah: ‘I want to end this blog entry with a simple calculation: In the last 5 days, more American citizens have died of cancer than the amount of Americans killed on 9/11 and in the Afghanistan and Iraq Wars combined.’
John Daly (not the famous golfer): ‘[People] are likely to overestimate the problem with mine safety and underestimate that with road safety, to overestimate the danger of terrorist attack and underestimate the risks of eating too much!’
John Daley (also not the famous golfer): ‘With my luck an asteroid would hit me while I was crossing one of those structurally deficient bridges.’
Jan-Willem de Lange: ‘De LA Times zet ook in op perspectief. Volgens de krant stierven vorige maand in de Verenigde Staten 3500 mensen door een auto-ongeluk, en overlijden iedere maand 42.000 mensen aan kanker. Aan hartkwalen gaat iedere 36 seconden een Amerikaan dood.’
Whether you’re an Amerikaan dood or non-American dudette, now’s the time to comment on Daum’s deathwatch, or any of our other chart-toppers. Perhaps someone can answer the eternal question, Why the Stonehenge??