Dish It to Downing: Can You Take the Dish

As you might expect, we were inundated with a flood of emails this week about just one thing: "The Real Housewives of Taylor County".

So immediate and overwhelming was your response to the story that we did a special edition of "Dish It to Downing" on Wednesday.

That, however, drew an equally angry response.

Christina W. took me to task for what she perceived as a defensive posture amid the viewer backlash.

She wrote: "I was horrified that instead of listening to the criticism your heard about the real housewives segment, you seemed to just read off the letter then rebut every comment. The whole segment was about proving you were right and everyone else was wrong. That kind of closed mindedness does nothing to answer people's real concerns. You welcome our comments in this section called "Dish It", but when you get negative criticism all you do is tell us why we are wrong. How about you admit that you were wrong? How about instead of defending an obviously incorrect decision to run this ridiculous story, you admit it was not well-received?"

First, it may look like a "rebuttal", but we're not defending ourselves as much as we are trying to let you see things from our perspective.

We have never said that we are right and you are wrong in this segment.

We just present you with our side of the story and let you decide for yourself once you get all the facts.

I can tell you that people don't always agree with us and we have made mistakes in the past.

When we do, we apologize and correct them.

This story was not well-received by a small, vocal segment of the viewing audience, but we've heard more comments about viewers over-reacting to the story than comments about the story itself.

As far as defending an "obviously incorrect decision", I think it was a legitimate story.

What constitutes news is subjective.

In other words, we may not always see eye-to-eye, but we can always agree to disagree.

Thanks for the email, Christina. Keep those cards, letters, and emails coming.

By the way, if you've ever wondered about what criteria we use for determining if a story is news or not, jump over to my blog.

Just go to the section at the top of the page marked "Blogs", click on it and go down to the "Dish it to Downing" blog.