http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/03/opinion/sunday/where-mental-asylums-live-on.html?ref=opinion
Why do you think mental illness and the treatment of the mentally ill is not a main concern for government and humanitarian funding internationally? What does this say about how people perceive mental illness?

It frightens me how dependent children can become on technology to entertain themselves. I have a cousin who is three, and he spends more than half his time on either his father's smartphone, my grandmother's TV, my phone, or my aunt's iPad. We don't let him do much except play games we deem "imaginative" enough-because we fear that if he is given too much structured play, he won't be able to entertain himself in the future. The joy of childhood is making it up as you go along, playing with the world around you, living almost entirely in a fantasy world of your own. If children now have only pixels to play with, I worry for the future. Who will create the next great comic book? Write the next bestseller? Think of the next blockbuster? With no imagination or room for creativity, we will turn our own little brothers and sisters, our own children into drones like the devices they are so dependent on.

The passages exchanged between Bill Keller and Glenn Greenwald forced me to consider changing my pre-standing opinion on the subject of opinions in news writing. Previously, I felt that personal opinion could be an effective method of delivering good news to those who would otherwise be disinterested. I believed that objective journalism was bland in it's personality-devoid state, and that eventually no one would find that interesting enough to read. However, after reading the arguments sent back and forth between Keller and Greenwald, I have changed my mind. News writing, I think, must be devoid of opinion. Greenwald called this kind of writing "dishonest", as if the journalists are bitterly shading their own desires and motives, but I see it as powerful. As Keller writes, "I think most readers trust us more because they sense that we have done diligence, not just made a case." He goes on to point out that we all automatically associate an opinion with a negative or positive connotation based on our own beliefs. He uses the New York Times as an example for non-liberals, but I noticed it myself while watching Fox News for a previous homework assignment. Since I was raised in a fiercely liberal household, in a fairly liberal area, and uphold my own liberal values based on information gathered from traditionally liberal sources, I automatically felt the need to discredit anything anyone said on Fox News as false, overdone, or an attack on my own beliefs and principles. This was because they showed bias and opinions that conflicted mine. I could not focus on the truth they were conveying, only the "personality" that Greenwald seems to think is so important. This impeded my fact-gathering.
In conclusion, I agree completely with Keller. Journalism should be the gathering and distribution of the most accurate and clear facts possible. It is the reader's job to form an opinion from those facts, not the journalist's (unless they are a clearly described opinion writer in the opinion section.) As Keller says, "I believe the need for impartial journalism is greater than it has ever been, because we live now in a world of affinity-based media, where citizens can and do construct echo chambers of their own beliefs. It is altogether too easy to feel "informed" without ever encountering information that challenges our prejudices."