Blog by Sumana Harihareswara, Changeset founder
Gavin de Becker can't stand local TV news. In…
Hi, reader. I wrote this in 2002 and it's now more than five years old. So it may be very out of date; the world, and I, have changed a lot since I wrote it! I'm keeping this up for historical archive purposes, but the me of today may 100% disagree with what I said then. I rarely edit posts after publishing them, but if I do, I usually leave a note in italics to mark the edit and the reason. If this post is particularly offensive or breaches someone's privacy, please contact me.
Gavin de Becker can't stand local TV news. In The Gift of Fear, he rails against its sensationalism and fearmongering and faddiness and generally low standard of reporting on about three separate instances in the book. But just as I thought, "wow, he's really peeved at TV news," he started out a new paragraph with "I discuss all this here as much more than a pet peeve."
Likewise, Hofstadter started losing me in his discussion of symbols and thought and the brain and finally said, "Perhaps this seems too abstract..." or some such.
As Leonard has noted, these disclaimers probably came in the editing-by-others stage of the book-writing.
