They are giving out a little newspaper at Starbucks called Good. It seems that Starbucks is taking a risk by aligning with this promotion.  If they are too controversial they will lose customers if they are too bland no one will read it and the value as a marketing tool will be lost.

The first one was about Carbon Emissions and had a major biased claim in it:

Even the UN which is a “Henny Penny” about carbon doesn’t think the sea level will rise 21 inches by 2050.  So I figured that they had a hidden agenda and their bias would be their undoing.

The next one I saw was about immigration and it was bland.  It was mostly about the costs of immigrating and the complications of the process.  Some of the numbers were wrong (7.9 Million = total US immigrant population last year) and one line in the introduction showed a bias that I agreed with “why coming illegally might seem like an attractive option.”

The latest Good was on education and it avoided controversies like mainstreaming, funding and charter schools and just reported facts about performance and dropout rates.

My opinion.  They are trying so hard for balance, simplicity and to be non controversial that they are not contributing to the debate on these issues at all.  I predict that the effort will fail.

My proposal.  Have a person from the right and the left on each of the issues make their arguments with back up data (that has been fact checked) and publish them side-by-side.