I just got this note from a friend:

Why do you guys keep saying, in relation to the Genius Awards , that the Stranger never likes anything, that this is the one time per year that you allow yourselves to be positive, etc? (Maybe it’s not “you guys”; maybe it’s only Christopher Frizzelle.) I don’t get it [and] it’s far from true. Most every single week, I read some enthusiastic review or blurb in the Stranger that makes me go out and watch, listen to, or buy something. Yeah, you don’t like everything, but you don’t dislike everything either.

She’s referring to this line from Christopher Frizzelle’s intro to the Genius Award package in this week’s paper:

The Stranger has a nearly nonexistent relationship with unabashed praise. Until three years ago, that is, when it dawned on us to pause the hating, pool our resources, and heap some love—and money, and cake—on the visual artists, theater artists, writers, filmmakers, and organizations that startle and excite us and make Seattle interesting.

My friend is 100% correct—we don’t hate everything. In fact, we go out of our way to heap praise up on the performers, artists, films, bands, restaurants, and even politicians every week. I looked at one randomly chosen issue of the Stranger—May 12-18, 2005—and found so many examples of enthusiastic praise that I had to stop looking or I would never get this post up. Go here, here, here, here, and here. Praise for artists, books, bands, Cubans—even praise for Greg Nickels. Hell, Frizzelle himself showed some love in the May 12 issue.

So why do blithely state that we’re haters and that we have to set aside one issue a year to heap love on a city that, in actual fact, we heap love on every week? When we print things or make statements that are untrue or innacurate, our readers jump down our throats, send angry letters, demand corrections, etc. So why would so few of our readers argue with “The Stranger has a nearly nonexistent relationship with unabashed…” when that statement is revealed to be a lie by every issue of the paper?

I’ll share my theories when my plane lands. But in the meantime…

Discuss.