Are you telling me that the polite little note I sent my college alumni magazine has, by some unbeknownst series of errors, come to be printed in The Paper of Record, instead? What a fiasco!

Another way in which our system is unfair. Why do Iowans get so much of a bigger voice every four years than everybody else? Ditto for New Hampshire. There are proposals and it could well happen that we could have a rotating calendar where different years different states went first. I would endorse that.

I think the media has to continually remind itself, and I think we do but sometimes not well enough that we're not just an economic property.

I don't know that it's a lack of creativity so much as it is , a lack of resources. And maybe a little bit of a lack of will but when you look at what fills every hour, let's just take CNN as an example, not because I think they're particularly egregious, but, they're sort of the ongoing hour, hour, hour. Why do they give us bulletins every single day on the latest poll? Very easy to cover a poll, right?

In terms of the rise of social media and the kind of discourse that it encourages, the kind of pointed attitude it encourages, in terms of the number of venues like our conversation here where reporters who are not technically opinion columnists are giving analysis that's invariably gonna edge into opinion. I think our journalism is getting much more almost European in terms of that, that ideal of objectivity exiting it.

After all, a creature without passionate conviction doesn't cling to extremes. He surveys the scenery and makes sure his outfit doesn't clash.

Campaigns waged with lies presage governments racked by distrust. The sclerosis starts there.