Part of it was right, Lou, but here's a different perspective.

Another view using Brancaccio's prose.

I guess becoming numb to the circumstances around us has its benefits.

For example, let’s say you’re a newspaper editor or editorial page editor who trashes most everything in sight. After awhile, one gets used to all the yelling and shouting, and it sort of becomes ambient sound.

It’s the crying wolf too often syndrome: If your modus operandi is to constantly bang the drum, it’s pretty easy — a benefit, if you will — to tune out the yelling. You get used to it.

But this isn’t about the papers I love to read. Rather it’s about this numbing phenomenon. Getting used to stuff.

And getting used to stuff may not always be the right thing.

As one of the blogs you frequently read in a given day, I do applaud your decision to actually mention this effort by name... finally... But you see, you still have a hard time figuring us out.

I have frequently taken your paper to task over the two+ decades I lived here since I left the military because of factual inaccuracies and agendas where your paper uses it's bully-pulpit to ram your agenda home... or to protect favored politicians, even from themselves (Lke Baird)... or to build an agenda, regardless of what the people want... by printing articles that make us seem to be supportive... when all the while, you ignore or belittle opposition to your efforts, and certainly fail to demand that these issues be put to a vote because, well, after all, we can't have a little thing like the will of the people actually get in the way of either your paper... or the government.

Fake polls for the CRC, outright attacks by Laird with you, all the while, preaching something called "civility."

So, yeah.... I admit it: I trash your paper.

But because you leave the most important element out of your "vision," the element of the wants of the people.... your paper DESERVES to be trashed.

You want to hear from us at the polls when you think our will dovetails with your own.

But in everything from I-200 (The legendary initiative that got rid of the affirmative action in this state's public sector (on the surface, at least)) in the face of your paper's "the sky is falling" attacks both against our efforts to pass it, and the nonsensical doom and gloom pronouncements of the editorialists there at the time up through I-695 ($30 car tabs and vote on tax and fee increases) through Koenninger beating the hell out of the Bea's and your paper's SUPPORT of Vancouver suing the voters into silence on downtown redevelopment, your organization has done, in my opinion, far more harm then good.

So, we leave you to engage in the cheerleading, whoopy-wall kind of stuff.

We use our meager resources to remind you that "fairness" and "accuracy" and "news" are more then mere arcane concepts. They are the standard to which you are, allegedly, to be held, but which all too often are forgotten through selective censorship either in stories (tell me again why you've failed to mention Russell's fetish for telling the world his wife is a doctor) or comments (disagree with you or Laird, do it in public on your website comment section, and you're far too often gone) or why you use obviously flawed polling with pre-ordained outcomes and, of course, why you typically fail to seek out opposition to the CRC that few want... and that most who DO want it won't have to pay for it.

I trash your paper. But I don't have a staff that writes for me, either. You have assets far superior to any local blogger. Nevertheless, that hasn't kept me from scooping you on the bogus Baird death threat by getting the actual FBI report or Russell's college degree fantasy. And writing articles in favor of or in agreement with your paper accomplishes nothing.

I know.... because on occasion, I have done that as well... but to what end?

And, at the end of the day, if you focused more on the science of journalism and less on crushing opposition by ignoring it or attacking it... if your paper truly cared about what the people wanted over your own, oh-so-superior vision... then I would have much less to say about your august organization.

But then, the likelihood that you would have had to carve out your very own B&O tax exemption or declare bankruptcy would have been much less as a result, since I and many others might actually have BOUGHT your paper.

Fat chance..