> [..] There’s a big difference between watching a half hour of CNN’s refugee crisis coverage (not that they cover it anymore) versus spending that time reading a 5,000-word article on the same topic.
In my opinion, in some cases like this, the lengthy thousands word articles are often much worse.
Can you give an example? I suspect you're referring to the same short-term ones the author is deriding, not the journalistic kind that take time to research and prepare.
Not a specific one, I meant more generally.
My point is that length alone isn't a reliable indicator for (journalistic) quality.
It is, to some extend. Long articles, with obvious effort for research etc., are more likely to be better than short pieces that for the most part are just commentary, on average at least.
But this is not a causational relationship. I've read long essays where you could easily tell the tremendous amount of work put into them, but then I did some research on my own and found out that the premisses are extremely dubious. And so the whole thing just collapses..
It died around the same time German women were molested by the dozens during New Year in Hamburg by newly arrived high-testosterone male refugees from war-torn Syria and parts of Africa (via Greece)
I think even more that most issues are multi-dimensional, and you can't even explain it as a spectrum between two extremes -- you can reasonably be in one of a half-dozen different takes on the issue, depending on how you feel about particular aspects or sub-issues.
"Both sides" is just a shorthand expression for principles otherwise better understandable as "due process", but this is hard to summarize in just some words or a couple sentences.
It basically means there are two sides (at least) to everything, that can't just be disregarded. Exceptions prove the rule, of course.
On another point, Hotelling's law is a really poor example when it comes to debates or questions of politics, in my opinion.
