If being “balanced” in your editorial approach means including people who say downright doltish things, are you really accomplishing anything useful? Talking about the Earth doesn’t oblige you to print the ravings of Flat Earthers. Having a mixture of opinions is only useful if the opinions, themselves, are useful.
Or, as Carl Sagan once put it, “They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown.”
Satire from McSweeney’s (h/t +Stan Pedzick).
In Order to Keep Our Editorial Page Completely Balanced, We Are Hiring More Dipshits
Here at the New York Times, we believe that all sides of the story should be tolerated and explored, from white supremacists being actually kinda c…
And of course, the reason they laughed at Columbus is because Queen Isabella, being an educated person of the 1400s, knew damned well that the earth was round and about 25K miles around – and no ship of the day could carry enough supplies to get to China going west from Europe. Columbus was an idiot and thought it was only 12K miles, which would mean a ship could just barely make it going west.
So Isabella gives Columbus 3 ships and waves goodbye, knowing that either he doesn't come back, and she's now free of this uneducated Italian bozo, or he comes back – which means he found something out there that was at least sufficient to reprovision for the return trip to Europe…