People in my hometown, Elizaville, Ky., were excited to hear that John McIntyre had appeared on the Rush Limbaugh radio show. Local boy makes good.

Googling suggests that the John McIntyre on the Limbaugh show may have been the John McIntyre of Real Clear Politics. So Local Boy is still just an ink-stained wretch editing copy for a great metropolitan newspaper. (Neither, by the way, am I the John E. McIntyre who is head of preservation at the National Library of Scotland nor the John E. McIntyre who was sentenced to prison in Florida for sending child pornography over the Internet.)

But a look at the political expressions at realclearpolitics.com led me to reflect a little about civility. Thirty-five years ago, I was a callow undergraduate, a McGovern Democrat, working in the summers at the Flemingsburg Gazette in Fleming County, Kentucky. Jean Denton, the publisher’s wife and editor of the paper, was as hard-core and principled a Nixon Republican as I have ever met. Privately, each of us thought the other’s political views repugnant, but we got along fine.

One reason was that we celebrated the things we agreed on, such as murder mysteries, dedicated schoolteachers and Joan Didion’s prose. We also enumerated our shared dislikes, such as the fractured syntax of the copy coming into the Gazette, and the disagreeable character traits of local figures (most  of whom have since paid Charon’s fare, carrying their faults with them, so there is no point in naming names).   

But the main reason was that we treated each other with respect and civility. Jean never spoke down to me as if I were some naïve and overly impressionable twerp, and I never, in word or tone, suggested that she was a bigoted mossback. We liked each other, we respected each other’s good qualities, and we overlooked minor eccentricities.

People who complain about bias in the news media go awry by missing the point. Half the time, they carp that the bias isn’t the bias they would prefer to see. Or they purport to hold up some entirely unreal yardstick of personal "objectivity." Who would want to read reportage from someone so apathetic, so namby-pamby as to have formed no opinion whatsoever about the issues of the day?

What we need is civility and respect. Civility and respect demand that multiple points of view get attention, and get attention without distortion or ridicule. You can write about opinions you do not like, just as you can work collegially with people whom you do not particularly care for.

Nixon is gone, and I’m not sorry. I thought he was a bad president. In fact, in the four decades I have been a voting adult, I’ve not had the experience of living under an administration in which I could think that the president was both an effective executive and an admirable person. But I’m a journalist; I’m supposed to be skeptical of everyone.

Jean Denton is gone, too, and I miss her. She and her husband, Lowell, were kind and generous to me. They gave me my start in this peculiar business, and they thought well of me even when they didn’t agree with me. ("Is John Early still backing that Communist?" Lowell once asked a colleague in the office.) Civility and respect beget more civility and respect in return.