Balanced Investigative Reporting

The Huan Hsu piece about Real Change was in the Seattle Weekly this morning. I read it on SW's website around 11AM, about two hours after this week's Real Change started being sold. I wanted to talk about Hsu's article a little bit this afternoon after I got home from feeding the kitty, but it wasn't on the website anymore. What's up with that? Oh well, I guess I can remember it well enough.

So let's see. What do I need to do here? I need to write a short article of my own. I will write a fair and balanced piece about Huan Hsu, to show how appreciative I am of the fair and balanced way he approached writing about RC. I'll call it:

Is Huan Hsu a Moron?

There's been a well-publicized shortage of writers at the Seattle Weekly, and Huan Hsu is one of the writers that's been recently hired to make up that shortage. It's been rumored that Mr. Hsu is a moron. We decided to do some investigating of our own, and see what we could determine regarding his brain power.

We didn't want to have to actually learn who Huan Hsu is, or research any of his accomplishments. We just wanted to raise our ignorant question about him and pretend to research it by asking people the answer to it. So we made our way downtown and asked some random interested parties.

The first person we talked to was Timothy H, a director of a local street paper. Timothy had strong words to say about Mr. Hsu. "Hsu? Oh yeah, he's a fucking moron alright. He's the fuckingest fucking moron this fucking city's ever fucking had."

Around the corner from Timothy was a hairy-faced man feeding a cat. The cat-feeding man insisted on remaining anonymous. He pretended to be somebody we've never heard of, Gabby Hayes, and said, "I sure do know Hsu, I named this here cat after him, yessireebob. What was the question, Sonny? Oh no, he's no moron, he's a writer. All them writer fellas is a little tetched in the head, but that don't mean they're stupid."

Since "Gabby" hadn't given us the answer we were fishing for at this stage in the story, we asked him to justify his answer. He said, "I guess what I'm saying is, if the man is getting paid to write, he can't be a total moron. Now if you want to see a total moron... " We moved on.

A short way down the street we found a vendor named Joey hawking some street papers. At first the vendor didn't know who we were talking about. Then we told him it was the guy who wrote in the Seattle Weekly about how some vendors make so much money they can afford apartments and asked if that was right or not.

Joey said, "He has to be a moron if he had to ask people if it was right. Anybody who's been a vendor can tell you it's not right. Look at me, I've been a vendor for Real Change for 3 months and I can't afford an apartment. If they'd just fire the ones that can, I could take over their business and I'd rake in the green too. Of course when I do they should fire me too."

So the consensus by then was 2 to 1 that Huan Hsu is a moron. We couldn't leave it at that and still say how balanced we were, so we picked on one other guy with a saintly disposition to ask the question again. The guy said "No." By the way, that last guy we asked just got out of prison last year, but don't let that make you discount his opinion.