In a discussion about Washington Post brouhaha with Howell, Jay Rosen unleashes this bit of wisdom:

Q: Let me tell you a danger I see and get your reaction to it. This isn’t a comment on your decision with the post.blog, but a larger problem. There’s a danger when journalists look at complaints about the news from people involved in a political struggle and discount them because they come from partisans. The highest rates of participation in politics and in the arguments found in newspapers have come during periods in our history when things were intensely partisan. A partisan might be defined as someone who gives a shit about the outcome of the political stuggles read about in the Washington Post in such splendid detail.

It seems to me if you’re dismissing the complaints of the partisans you’re reacting in exactly the wrong way; they’re your best customers. They’re way involved in the news. You have to find a way of hearing them, or your sunk. Of course some of them are crazy, excessive, extremely rude and they say things for shock value or just to rage at the machine. Maybe it’s hard to find the signal in the noise, but that is exactly what the press has to do. There’s an idiocy to partisan complaints; there’s also the heart and soul of politics in them. No political journalist can afford to ignore that, and no online editors, either. I’m afraid that after an incident like this, more will. What do you think?

Do we expect our representatives to be partisan at times? Does a two party system work better or worse when representatives are partisan? Is being partisan inherently wrong or right? Something to think about.

On a side note, I’m sorry about the relative quiet around here. With the launch of Josh’s blog, we lost the second most prolific author on FatMixx. I’ve also been a little burned out on essay blogging and needed some time off. I’ve been getting the itch to write more, though, so I’m going to take the State of the Union address as an opportunity to do that. I’m also going to do more technology stuff as topics come up (there are some ideas that I’ve been putting off).

Plus some more feature changes will be coming to the site.

Update: Salon has a great overview of the whole WaPo/Howell/Abramoff reporting controversy. The report is thorough and does a very good job of airing the facts in addition to both sides explanations.