In the next few weeks I hope to just meander about the landscape, trying to give an impression of my impressions. This is going to be nothing authoritative. But what you see on the nightly news is hardly the place to start either.
Complex questions are one of the tricks in trade of reporters.
Complex questions, when deployed by a skillful reporter can, in one fell swoop, sabotage public opinion about complicated issues. One example that made me chuckle recently was the minor meltdown in Japan of a nuclear facility. The thing that made me snigger was that the persons interviewed in Japan, even with its horrible experience of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, were genuinely puzzled by this leading question. Quite frankly I suspect Jane Fonda and Richard Gere were greatly incensed. I don't mean this to be a debate on nuclear power for energy.