Thursday, May 3, 2007

Cohen: "Dick Cheney will lie, denying that he's a liar"

The Courier editors give us a truncated version of this Cohen column, headlined at Real Clear Politics as "Kucinich's Case Against Cheney." (It's from yesterday, but for some reason has yet to appear on the WaPo site.) For you scorekeepers out there, it's 297 out of 758 words, broken mid-paragraph. So again it's liberal-opinion-as-filler, but on the upside the headline is sort of intelligible and there's no editing inside to screw it up further. A very simple slashing.

6 comments:

leftturnclyde said...

why is it that Bill O'Reily can get whatever his latest Rant is published nearly unedited by the courier and any Liberal writer gets on average 2/3's of their essay cut and frequently edited so the point they were trying to make is gutted .
I wonder who is doing all this creative editing...

MrsDartt said...

Lefty, maybe the more liberal columns are longer. All these columns must fit into a certain-sized space on the editorial page. Next time, maybe you can measure the amount of space each one takes up and see if it's the same. I'm not sure if this is the case, but it's a possible explanation.

Steven Ayres said...

=>maybe the more liberal columns are longer

Since I've been tracking this, every outside column the Courier has chosen started at around 800 words.

Anonymous said...

http://farm1.static.flickr.com/1/452633_06158c15a4_m.jpg

MrsDartt said...

Steve, when the columns start at 800 words, what do they end up at? Is it different for the conservative columns than it is for the liberal ones?

Steven Ayres said...

Yes, in looking closely over the past month, I find that the Courier treats right-wing columns with much more respect. Search this blog for O'Reilly, Goodman, Cohen, Thomas, Reagan and Robinson, and compare for yourself.