With authority.
A recent Tapped web log entry states:
The New York Times‘ Tom Friedman debunks the myth of public support for the war here. Not authoritatively, we should point out, but anecdotallly [sic] — and convincingly.
(*) Where? Actually, the debunking is in the New York Times. Even had Tapped put the hyperlink in the right place, it would still be confusing. It’s too common a custom of web designers and web loggers to reference objects on the Internet with the odd description “here,” as if one were pointing at it, and then providing a link for leaving one’s site, which was presumably “here” at the beginning, but “here” now being there, “here” is here no longer. Leaving aside whether Friedman’s argument—that the American public really does not support the war, despite poll results—Tapped makes the ungrammatical and doubly dubious statement at the end of the paragraph that Friedman’s argument is both not authoritative and yet convincing. Authoritative means either of the nature of authority, or possessing a conclusive or convincing quality. Polls are not authoritative in the sense of having authority. To say that a poll may or may not be authoritative in that sense—the sense of political authority or power—misrepresents the fundamental design of our democratic system. Polls are not democracy in action, at least not in our democracy. Polls are informal. They do not have the stamp or seal of authority. When done well, a poll result is accurate of the population studied. That is all a poll does. A poll has no power, sovereignty, or authority per se. If Tapped was using authoritatively as a synonym for convincingly, then what could it have meant by saying it was “[n]ot authoritatively. . . but. . . convincingly [made]”?
Although I cannot be correct every time myself, or hold up an offender for chastisement more than rarely, I believe that some should keep to a higher standard, and far from anything being wrong with that, high standards are quite important to civilization.