To the editor:

In Saturday’s Journal-World, the editorial page editor highlighted the following from an Ellen Goodman column defending the mainstream media (MSM), while maligning an alternative media now taking its place: “There is a sense that we don’t need science or fact-checking as long as we have crowd-sourcing. We don’t have to build opinions on fact; we can build facts on opinions.”

Goodman’s Saturday column (like all others) then lists some of her own crowd-checked opinions which she elevates to facts, and which we should believe simply because she condescendingly says so. She presents neither facts nor arguments. She then laments a rapidly declining MSM, without which we, the hapless public, won’t know what the facts are.

Well, Ellen, some of us grown-ups manage anyway, in spite of your best efforts to determine that ourselves. If all the alternate sources you disparage were really as bereft of facts, arguments and science, and laughable, they would be in decline, not the MSM. You see, Ellen, this is a new competitive age, and you can’t be an autocratic gate-keeping censor any more. (Do you remember those old Radio Free Europe spot messages?)

Consider the criticism that you despise as customer feedback, which normal businesses deride or ignore at their own peril. But, then, I doubt that an old ankle-biter like you can learn any new tricks.