The other side

It's easy to talk to people when you agree with them. When Democrats talk to Democrats and when Republicans talk to conservatives, everybody gets along. However, these "one-sided" discussions don't foster much debate.

And so, after spending half a semester in a class taught by a leftist, it was refreshing to hear someone from the right weigh in on independent media. Mark Finkelstein is originally from NewsBusters, which is a media watch group seeking to expose liberal media bias. Now he's got his own blog.

I had met Mark several months earlier, and his visit to Ithaca College's Covering the Election class showed two sides that came from the opposite ends of the political spectrum, engaging us in a back-and-forth debate.

This time around, I asked Mark what he thought about Jon Stewart's takedown of CNBC's Jim Cramer. He said Stewart picked on Cramer because of an anti-Obama comment. While it's true that Cramer wasn't the only one giving an audience bad information about the stock market, SOMEONE needed to be called out. CNBC was an easy pick because, for one, its a TV station. Sure, the Wall Street Journal made some mistakes, but it's much more appealing to show a video clip than it is to point at a newspaper.

What Stewart did wasn't exactly journalism, but it wasn't entirely satire either. More importantly, he sent out a valuable message, that we can't be afraid to hold people accountable, and that we need to foster debate.