Media: left, right

With regard to the column by Sandor M. Polster titled, “Tale of media paranoia” [the weather station]. It was neat, but how does the fantasy differ from, say, the reality of The Chicago Tribune practices in the 1930s? If we could get from there to here, a little backsliding in that direction scarcely seems to endanger the republic.

Besides, slanting the news is hardly a sin exclusive to the right. The New York Times is very given to mentioning when a crime is committed with an “automatic weapon,” but never notes that a victim is unarmed.

May I make a suggestion? The tendency of the left to see the right as being driven by paranoia is paranoid in itself. Is it even remotely credible, for instance, that a conservative Congress would act to harm the elderly, a group that votes out of all proportion to its numbers? And yet, that seems to be what liberals believe; how do we explain this if not by the left’s being in the grip of some “demon theory”? John K. Lunde Orono