The incomparable Scott Rosenberg has picked up on something I’ve been wondering about, namely why is the New York Times giving so much op-ed space to right-wing crazies?

Part of his answer reads:

There must be an argument going through someone’s head at the Times that goes like this: Their newspaper is under assault from the right, most recently because of its exposure of the Bush administration’s illegal-wiretap power grab; so it must achieve the impression of “balance” by presenting these op-ed voices from the right. But really, to balance the Cato people you’d have to find some wild-eyed leftist arguing that, say, all oil companies should be nationalized tomorrow.

The greatest achievement of the right over the past decade — oh, setting aside the seizure of “all three branches of government” in the wake of a disputed election, the plundering of the Treasury, and the derailing of the war on al-Qaida — is this: By a wide swath of American opinion-makers, “balance” is understood to mean that the usual welter of mainstream American voices needs to be weighed down by a gang of beady-eyed ideologues on right-wing think-tank payrolls who can barely construct a sensible argument.

US journalism is in a desperate state — and has been ever since Reagan’s time. Part of the problem is the delusion that ‘balancing’ opposing views is a way of avoiding bias. Paul Krugman memorably satirised this delusion in an amusing parable. If George W. Bush said that the earth is flat, the US media would report it under the headline: “Opinions Differ on Shape of the Earth.”

But the earth isn’t flat, and any journalist with a commitment to the truth has an obligation to say so. Otherwise he’s just lending credibility to nonsense by implying that it must somehow be weighed equally with sense.

“Balance as bias” is also the basis for the lunatic proposition that creationism (aka “Intelligent Design”) ought to be accorded the same epistemological status as evolution in US schools.

Tony Banks has died, unexpectedly, while on holiday in Florida. We’ll miss him: he was one of the few genuinely funny men in British politics. There’s a rather po-faced Obituary in the Guardian which doesn’t do him justice.

Banks could be fabulously rude. He once said of a Tory MP (I think it was Terry Dix) that he was living proof that “a pig’s bladder on a stick could be elected to Parliament”. His advice to a new MP was to “remember that your opponents are in the other party; your enemies are in your own”. For some of us, his greatest quality was his capacity to make Margaret Thatcher incoherent with rage when she was trying to kill the Greater London Council, of which he was (with Ken Livingstone) a leading light.

The Guardian obit quotes one of his most celebrated parliamentary interventions:

In a debate on organ transplants shortly after the Tory minister Cecil Parkinson [a Thatcher favourite] had been involved in a sex scandal, he asked: “May I put in a bid for Cecil’s plonker – one careful owner.”

.

As he said about himself: “Good taste was never one of my qualifications”. Life will be duller without him.

The BBC’s Political Editor writes in his Blog:

It was – people say – Westminster’s worst kept secret. I refer, of course, to Charles Kennedy’s drinking.

The implication, therefore, is that we political reporters conspired to keep it that way – a secret. Hold on a second. Not so fast. There is a big, big difference between knowing that Charles Kennedy drank a lot and knowing that he had a drink problem and was undergoing treatment.

I knew the first but certainly did not know the second. The same is true of all the political reporters I know and all but Charles Kennedy’s closest circle. I knew that Mr Kennedy sometimes drank more than he should. I could see that for myself and I heard it from those who worked closely with him.