- As you say, analysis is harder than no-analysis. Therefore some outlets will still find a competitive advantage in churning out fact-rich, analysis-poor information as quickly as possible.

- More perilously: I think news junkies like you and I (and most of your readers) should be wary of projecting our preferences onto the general public's. To most casual news readers — not the ones who send emails or post comments, but the ones who glance at front pages on their way to the comics — an article that's been carefully pruned into evenhandedness can often be more useful and easier to digest than one that takes a point of view. Deciphering and evaluating points of view — learning to distinguish Ezra Klein from Mickey Kaus from Glenn Reynolds — is a task best suited to people willing to spend a lot of time gathering news.

There is just no getting around the truth that after the event, the selection of facts is fraught with implicit judgments and the selections are filtered through personal and socially supported lens. It's why jury trials have such a hard time figuring out the "facts of the case" and why eye witnesses are sometimes the most unreliable. It's also why lawyers spend so much of their time finding and presenting the "facts of the case." And historians do the same. Presenting the facts in a particular order is the "analysis" in the sense of the patterns that create meaning for the reader or viewer or jury.

To be clear, I am not suggesting that events are not amenable to becoming facts. Merely that it is a complex process. I agree with Terry's point about "just the facts, ma'am." I'm just saying that translating facts into useful data points might be exactly the irreducible value of journalism. Everyone is entitled to do "analysis" or "commentary". Some patterns emerging from the data points work for me. Some don't. But that's not the core of the journalist's job.

I agree that what you call the "voice-of-God" presentation is useless and misleading. The way I see it, when a reporter adopts that mannerism, they're concealing the details and over-generalizing. It's as if, when my source(s) say it, it's "obviously" quite true and you (the reader) don't need to know the details.

So, at this point, are we seeing the issue in a similar way?

The reason that, as you say, the second version I provided above is more "specific and factual" is because it does away with the view-from-nowhere presentational convention that the first attempts to mimic.

I see I'm not making my point clearly enough. I expect the writer of a news story to convey to me facts. The reporter's only job is to let me know what happened. However, I think we agree that this needs to rise above stenography; some degree of interpretation is necessary to translate 'he-said/she-said' into more factual and useful description.

If, rather than a news report, the writer has produced an analysis piece, that's different. However, in this case, in most situations, I'm not as interested in the reporter's interpretation of the situation as I would be of the interpretation of others (interviewed by the reporter) who may have a lot more credibility (than the reporter, per se).

If the reporter is writing commentary, I'm interested if I value the insights of the commentary writer. If the writer has a reputation and history of providing what I consider valuable insights, I will appreciate and read it. Otherwise, I could care less what the writer is saying.

Put bluntly, I don't we should assume that a good reporter necessarily has good insights into the dynamics behind the news events, let alone deep and useful opinions about the forces at work behind the events. It's nice when they do, but in that case, we have to be careful not to confuse facts and speculation/opinion.

In the examples you cite in your latest response, you state that the reporters involved are (and I gather, should be, in your view) providing "analysis." As to your example sentence, I would agree that the second version is superior simply because it is more specific and factual – but neither of the two versions involve any analysis per se.

But I guess the Cohn/Henry case is askance of my main argument. In brief, I think this sentence…

A senior staffer for a Democratic Senator expressed concerns that Obama's health care reform plan was moving too quickly to accommodate the lengthy bipartisan negotiation process.

… is journalistically and narratively inferior to this one …

I got an e-mail this afternoon from one of my regular sources, a senior staffer in a Democratic senator's office, saying he worries Obama's quick timeline on health reform is making it hard to bring Republicans on board.