I meant "take as good as I give"

D@mn it!!! My pointing out the mistakes of others has brought about very bad karma!!!

Proofreader - and Michael:

Feel free. I can take as good as I get. Actually, you both could have caught my act of redundancy in my former post, which I just did:

"...restating the obvious yet again."

Did I really need to say "yet again" after I said "restating"?

I give myself an F for that one.

Randy's post is interesting in two ways. First it raises the issue of cognitive dissonance which is a good description of political discussion nowadays, and second, it gives Mr. Sweetland the very irony he's looking for.

There were 26 posts, including Randy's, at the time of his post. 8 were clearly in favor of or in defense of McCain-Palin. 10 were clearly pro Obama-Biden or in defense of that ticket. 3 were on topic. And 5 were neutral or off-topic.

Here's the irony as provided by Randy in his quote - "But most all of the respondents here are categorizing the writers/editors/site as pro-Obama and/or anti-McCain, and reacting with their own points of view."

Randy's inability to recognize that 8 of 26 posts actually categorize the writers/editors as pro-Obama and/or anti-McCain is a perfect illustration of cognitive dissonance, where one seeks consistency among his or her beliefs at the expense of reality. To do so, the individual must identify the inconsistency and change something on his/her end, usually one's own attitude. Thus, Randy saw 8 pro-McCain posts and concluded that all 26 were pro-McCain, when in fact upon closer review, even the pro-Obama posts outnumbered those. Do your own analysis. Even if you disagree with me on some posts, clearly you will find that the minority of the 26 posts were pro-McCain. In fairness, the minority of the 26 posts were pro-Obama.

If you want to stay on topic, give this a try. If you want to be cognitive dissonant, then go off topic and tell us why your candidate should win and the other should lose.

Folks. Good thread and meaningful discussion. Cognitive dissonance (Festinger, 1954) has been a "staple" in persuasion and speech communication theory for many years. It is one of the most widely-espoused theoretical structures speech communication employs and is one of the most stable. We use many others, some from psychology, social psychology, sociology, etc. Festinger's theory is highly meaningful to us--an "oldie but a goodie."

"... fire the proofreader at Ragan."

Ha! I figured those "rare-mistake-and-you're-fired" people wouldn't be the same ones who follow a blog about the communications business. I get enough of that attitude at my company - and in my past life in newspapers.

Jon, should we ban you from posting when we catch one of your slip-ups? *kidding*

Michael:

I thought the vogue for so-called "cognitive dissonance," a phrase imported from psychology and the other social sciences, had run its course. Most of the writers I've read use it ironically, of course (who is NOT ironic, these days?).

I hope you have shown some political bias in this blog, Michael. It wouldn't be worth a damn if you didn't.

By the way, what is the opposite of "cognitive dissonance? Cognitive consonance? Cognitive assonance?

I was the proofreader on that one. Thanks for the catch.

Well, I've certainly made my views about Ragan's practices in its PR Junkie many times before and with great detail, so I won't bother restating the obvious yet again.

Suffice it to say, I think Randy has the wrong end of the stick. Either he hasn't read past PRJ blogs that have incited similar comments, or he might have similar points of view and simply can't discern any bias on a subconcious level. Either way, I disagree.

One more thing...

"You’re brain works to accommodate the new and the old..."

Michael, old sport...fire the proofreader at Ragan.

I have to agree with Randy for the most part, but he should have read more carefully. While the initial PR Junkie post was mostly nonpolitical and very PR-centric, there were indeed a couple of gentle jabs at McCain and some polite cheers for Obama. But what Randy really should have noted was that the comments were full of emotional comments from both Obama and McCain supporters, not just McCain supporters. Not sure how "cognitive dissonance" applies when both sides are outraged.

That said, I did comment in the thread that there did seem to be a major disconnect between the communications aspects of the situation and pure political soap-boxing. I believe that may have been Randy's main point, which I couldn't support more. PLEASE start a "Political Junkie" blog or consider renaming this one. That might clear some of this "cognitive dissing" up.