Books, Politics, and The Lies

One of my longstanding plans for blogging has been to offer commentary on the St. Petersburg Times, which qualifies as the local paper for me. Local radio show host Ron Diaz famously refers to the paper as the Slant Petersburg Lies. Like Diaz, I find myself frequently at odds with the paper in their news presentation and especially their editorial positions.

Somebody handed me a clipping from the Sunday edition of the Times, consisting of an article titled "The politics of political book reviews" by Margo Hammond.
Hammond is the book editor for the Times.

The main gist of the article is quite reasonable. Hammond talks about the findings of Valdis Krebs, who examined the correlations in book reading habits for those who read political books. Unsurprisingly, Krebs found that those reading the right-leaning bombastic books didn't read the corresponding material from the left, while those reading the left-leaning bombastic books didn't read those from the right.
The article had a visual, but I found a superior visual by searching online.

My only caveat with the article is the dismissive attitude that Hammond displayed toward the political books that tended toward polemic, saying "My own philosophy in picking political books for review has been to choose those that engender discussion, not disgust."
That seems like a very narrow view. There's nothing to bar the polemicist from including new or groundbreaking material. I've found, for example, that Ann Coulter frequently sheathes a strong argument inside the scathing language. Neither the right nor the left is monolithic in belief; anyone reading any of the full works listed is bound to think about the issues somewhere near their capacity. The bigger point that Hammond seems to miss is that books that sell well are news. Her opinion that people need to read books that generate "more light, not more heat" sets aside the fact that the people from either extreme are not reading the books from the other side. The supposedly fair-minded reviewer misses an opportunity to bridge the gap by not offering the fairest possible criticism of a newsworthy book.

Krebs' article.
Hammond article (St. Petersburg Times).
Original visual (the later of the two).