Best of the Web, Not

When I met James Taranto, author of the WSJ's "Best of the Web" column, at the October 2003 BloggerCon, he struck me as a pretty smart guy. While we don't agree on much politically, the discussion we had over dinner after the first day's sessions was very interesting and engaging. I've never really been able to reconcile the person I met with the rather angry and arrogant tone of his online work, but public and private personas can and do sometimes differ, so I never worried too much about it.

Today, however, I read about his recent "challenge," and I'm rethinking my assessment. Taranto asked:

Can you find a similar article — that is, a news story, not an opinion column, preferably written months before the election — speculating about the possibility of a Republican landslide in 1994, when there actually was one? How about in 1980?

Now, most readers aren't going to do the research to confirm or deny this, and Taranto no doubt knows this. He's implying there aren't any such articles, therefore there must be liberal bias in the media, blah blah blah.

But shouldn't Taranto already know that a lot of these articles were, in fact, written? He works for a big media company — surely he has Lexis/Nexis. Wouldn't you suppose that he would run a couple of quick queries before asking the world this question, if only out of curiosity?

It's certainly possible Taranto was being lazy and careless, making a half-assed argument for a premise that he could have easily confirmed or denied if he had only bothered to spend a couple of minutes at the computer. But as I said, he struck me as a smart guy, so I can only conclude that he was trying to be a little too clever by half, implying, but never claiming explicitly, something which he knows to be false. After all, being smart doesn't make you good.