Because these observations are my own, they are in some regards infallible. My experience in a youth church group, or how my dog died, or what its like to live in a trailer park - all of these things make my contribution to the current events discussion more real, and less subject to the football-crowd responses of people who have fallen into political camps, and base their responses entirely on layers and layers of media.

I used my personal experience to elucidate my view on some current event. Jim was transparently angry, calling everything I write a series of 'whoppers.' I thought, how appropriate for the political journalist. A travel writer cannot defend himself against a big-name journalist if the journalist simply dismisses his personal experiences as pure fabrications. In that single remark, the journalist was able to dismiss me completely, without having to comment on the content or even seriously chew on the possibility that those were my genuine experiences.

Once a personal story loses its credibility and becomes accused of being fictionalized, it loses all of its value. An opinions journalist has no such credibility to uphold. The experiences he recounts are never his own, they are what's reported in the paper. He lives in an isolated and safe world, behind a desk.

It was after this exchange of words that I began to think about the value of the personal account.  The opinions journalist, is, like us, a subjective person, but they cloak it with the veil of objectivism.  As journalists, their newspaper, rather than their gumption and consistency, provides the baseline for their credibility.  Journalists are offered their reputations on the platter of their host publication.

It is no wonder that Jim disdained so much the personal account - the unsubstantiated story whose personal opinion comes from personal experience.  I took the condemnation of Thompson as a condemnation of myself, and my preference for explaining things from street level.