Kevin Drum makes some good points about cable news, and his argument about the relative size of the Fox News audience, in particular, stands out. This ends up of a piece with earlier comments about how extremely vocal minorities have a bigger effect on the current state of political discourse than the normal "squeaky wheel gets the grease" formulation would have you expect.

In what I would consider a different tack of the same argument, Andrew Sullivan flags a piece that speaks to the utter uselessness of cable news. The point here, I think, is that the availability of individual news items on the Internet obviates the need for some blowhards arguing back and forth over what that news item actually means. Sullivan's comment is that "All I see of it now is on the web, The Daily Show or Colbert. I feel far more informed because of that choice."

This sort of pulls the argument in two different directions at the same time, but they're not really contradictory. People like their filters. Sullivan either wants a smart filter (which is more like a meta-filter, but I'll get to that in a minute), or no filter at all. He'll just drink from the firehose.

Chicago DJ James Van Osdol made an interesting observation that's pretty essential to this while talking about travel writing, saying:

I've made my peace with both the nightly news and the watered-down and politically safe album reviews that Rolling Stone publishes. I treat radio "travel times" as educated guesses, rather than fact. I'm an information consumer, circa 2010, who uses the media as a "gateway drug" to further learning.

Beats listening to NPR 24/7.

That's pretty much it in a nutshell. It used to be the reporter's credo that "if your mother says she loves you, check it out," but now the onus falls on the consumer of that reporter's work. That percentage of people who live on Fox News don't even consider that they're not seeing the entirety of the story. So it comes to these sort of meta-filters like Colbert or the blogosphere to interpret the interpretations of what actually happened, and not everyone realizes that this extra semantic layer (a) exists and (b) has become necessary to cut through the bullshit.

Of course, none of this even addresses the quality of the meta-filters, which, on the Internet at least, can vary wildly, since any jackass with an Internet connection can write a piece on how meta-filters sit on top of filters that sit on top of...hey, where are you going?

It shouldn't really be news that a journalist at a mainstream institution like Time magazine is casting a skeptical eye at the framing of some political arguments, but I feel like Karen Tumulty taking a hard -- and even somewhat preemptive -- look at what both sides and some experts have said in the past about "self-executing rules" is the exception that proves the rule.

The generous view here is that the scales are starting to fall from Tumulty's eyes, and she's investigating the issue thoroughly and providing proper context instead of just repeating the talking points she's getting from one side or the other. The dim view is that, if you're on one side or the other, this looks like one of those "giving the opposing view equal consideration even when it doesn't deserve it" exercises the mainstream media are so good at. I'm in a hopeful mood today, so I'm going with the former.

Newsweek reports that President Obama is appointing Edward Tufte to an advisory panel for stimulus/recovery funds. Apparently Tufte also consulted on the design of recovery.gov, and he's as big of a rock star as you can be when it comes to the visual representation of complicated data. I've been to one of Tufte's presentations, and have three of his books on my shelf. It's not a glamorous move towards government transparency, but it's a move nonetheless.

As for other cool uses of data, Nate Silver -- a data analysis rock star in his own right -- built a couple of "word clouds" off of open-ended questions in a recent health care poll. It does a really good job of breaking down the two sides of the debate.

It still doesn't necessarily tell the whole story, though, as some of those against reform are actually against what shows up in the first cloud as opposed to what shows up in the second cloud. Not all, but some, as evidenced by a report of a town hall meeting between a Blue Dog Democratic house member and some Tea Party folks.