Some weeks, writing this column is easy. All it takes is for an influential person – a politician, a business person, perhaps even a fellow columnist – to say something dumb and I get to spend a thousand words or so explaining precisely why they’re wrong. The “why x is wrong about y” construction is the columnist’s best friend: it’s as old as the hills and even easier to build a house on.

Some weeks though, it’s even easier than that. Someone will say something so breathtakingly wrong – so tracheotomy-cravingly moronic – that I don’t need to explain anything. Simply quoting their words back at them is sufficient to make the point.

Step forward, Jimmy Wales.

Oh, this one is richly delicious!

Those words could stand alone as a monument to Wales’ wrongness – a warning for future generations on why we must never heed the advice of a man who calls himself ‘Jimbo’.

Oh, this one is richly delicious!

Even with high quality investigative reporting, if the story is big enough then someone will simply rewrite it – perfectly legally – and post it on a blog, where it will then be reblogged and retweeted and aggregated.

There remains, however, one reason to remain loyal to a single newspaper – or at least to visit that newspaper’s online edition every day. And that’s for its editorial voice: the unique tone with which a publication interprets the basic facts of a news story and helps us form an opinion on it. Which, of course, is where columnists come in.

I’m with Wales on this. There is no need for newspapers or pundits really. I haven’t watched TV news in over a year, and haven’t picked up a newspaper (unless it was thrown at me in the metro) in two years. I care not for some journalist’s opinion, just for the hardcore results or evidence, and from there I’ll come to my own conclusion.

I follow all the major news organizations on RSS or Twitter, but I do not read their Op-Eds. Just want to know what’s going on in the world (hence I read the same piece from multiple organizations).

Well, I think, and I’m sure this may annoy Paul much more than anything I said at the conference the other day, that there may very well be some economic value in writing outrageous and inflammatory schlock that insults and doesn’t make sense.

Oh, this one is richly delicious!