Fark founder says reporters obsessed with "nutjobs"

This is not unlike what Christian Sinderman was telling us today about how the press always looks for the one opponent to something, even a wildly popular idea, to provide "balance." This is from a great column by Slate's Jack Shafer about a book by the founder of Fark.

Instead of urging journalists to raise their standards—the typical tack taken by
the press-guardian-industrial complex—Curtis puts the onus on readers, insisting
that they become better news consumers. The educated reader's top enemy is the
"filler" of non-news, he argues, which the mass media pumps out whenever there's
not enough hard news to complete a newscast or fill a newspaper. Through this
crack come the inaccurate, fear-mongering stories about germs, earthquakes, and
potential terrorist attacks; the worthless formula stories hooked on changing
seasons, hot-weather spells, shark attacks, and holiday traffic patterns—the
media events generated by PR firms that reporters translate into news stories.
Even when journalists do right they often go wrong, he writes, by pausing in the
middle of well-reported pieces to give equal time—in the name of balance—to
flat-earth "nutjobs" (his word) who take the opposing view.