I noticed I have not thanked quite a few other commenters who have added their insights and nuances to the thread. All comments have been read and appreciated. Merci!

Still I’d suggest most magazines and members of our culture today SHOULD capitalize Celebrity.

Compare. Good communication requires e.g. parents and teachers to say to children or students, if necessary: “That is not a smart thing you did”. But do not say: “You are not smart”. It makes a huge difference. Jumping from the first statement to the second would be… a gratuitous, negative generalization.

So I tried to communicate the best way possible to make a point.

Caution in making a generalization, especially a negative one, is in order given the good reasons that Wilfried cited. But generalizations, “positive” and “negative,” are necessary for us to function. When we are warned to avoid being like “the world,” surely we recognize that as a useful generalization with obvious exceptions.

The standard that we must avoid “gratuitous, negative generalizations” is too broad. All opinions can be gratuitous (i.e. unwarranted, unjustified) by some standard. Wilfried just called the commenters he quoted intellectually lazy and morally isolated. That is a negative generalization. He can’t possibly know enough about them to really make that claim with authority. But he is doing what all humans must do: making judgements, even negative ones, on limited information.

In a world where truth is stranger than fiction, though, it can often be hard to tell the difference. If a priest can be charged with criminal hate speech in Canada for saying homosexual acts lead to hell, and wearing a head scarf is illegal for schoolgirls in France, and a disabled man can receive a government subsidy to pay for prostitutes in–where was that? it seems one would have to have special knowledge of the low countries to know this report was unreliable. It doesn’t seem so far out. And how is one to know about contemporary events but from the media, if one doesn’t live there oneself?

I think it is appropriate to strongly condemn the media here. On such an obviously sensitive topic this sort of error is grave. It is really shameful what poor quality information the media will often pass along. The recent LA Times article on DNA and the Book of Mormon is a good example of stupidly credulous (or cynically sensationalist) reporting. And yes, people should know the media is not always reliable. And wow, our ignorance of each other is lamentable! I think you are asking a bit much of the media readers, though. Of course, your point is similar to one I made a couple days ago on this blog, so maybe I am being inconsistent.

Maybe it was the reporter’s editor who, thinking the article was about a pretty blase` of topic, overly tightened up his piece, the original of which might have included the details explaining that generic usages should be left uncapitalized.

And even if were the reporter himself gave the description short shrift, we of course know how reporting is so driven by deadlines and often allows no time to let a piece sit for its creators to come back to it fresh to see if it’s misleading.

It finally took a Mormon reporter to get a balanced article about the church in Newsweek.

Has it occurred to anyone that other major and repetitive news items may be overblown and misrepresented due to both lack of detail and an agenda on the part of the media? Such as global warming or ozone depletion? I’ve read some good refutations of global warming, and how a core of alarmists have cooked the books. Examples include: failing to mention that the breakup of pack ice north of Canada occurs in 50 year cycles, and is _not_ a brand new phenomenon that must be attributable to global warming. That the rise in global temperatures in the 20th century was actually greater _before_ 1950 than after 1950 when man started pumping all the so-called greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. That a not insignificant portion of the global warming figures is attributable to places like Siberia warming up from -40 to -39, and is that a bad thing?. That the data collectors/observers have unjustifiably shifted observation points to urban areas away from rural areas (which are naturally cooler) out of proportion to the percentage of land area covered by the urban areas. (IE, the shifting of observation points to cities has increased by more than the land-area growth of cities.)