There’s no escaping stupidity. It’s everywhere, and if you hope to keep your sanity you have to learn to live with that fact.
But every so often one particular source of stupidity just gets under my skin so deep that I can’t shrug it off. What is it, pray tell, about publishing newspapers that attracts so many people to whom ’idiot’ would be a compliment? We’re talking about people whose sole qualification for being placed on a pedestal is that their heads are as stone-stuffed as a marble bust — yet almost invariably such people believe themselves better qualified than you or I to make important decisions for ourselves and our communities.
Consider just one issue: During my adult life I have lived in just three places. But in each of these places, the local newspapers have pushed — in the face of convincing evidence the locals are deadset against it — consolidation of city and county governments. In two of those places, past efforts have gone down in flames so convincingly that anyone with an I.Q. that doesn’t begin with a zero and a decimal point would get the message, but in both places the newspapers persist. The oddball locale has never even allowed a vote on the issue and most elected officials (who would normally jump at the chance for centralized power) are openly opposed. Yet the newspaper pushes it nonetheless.
As if that weren’t bad enough, the publisher of that community’s local daily seems to have such a seething personal grudge against certain county commissioners that his opinion has been driving the way local news is covered (rather than the news driving editorial opinion, which was once the normal way of running a newspaper). Any criticism of this is met personally by the publisher with defensiveness and sarcasm. How reassuring of his publication’s objectivity.
Is it something in the ink? Does the chemical composition of newsprint cause severe brain damage — which is most strikingly noticeable in those who have risen through the ranks to become editors and publishers? Could that be it?
The Daily Routine, of course, is not a newspaper. Nor, as plainly stated in its mission statement, is its news section presented under the guise of a purely objective rundown of news stories. People who read it know, or ought to know, what they’re getting. And people who read a daily publication purporting to be a newspaper ought to get news stories presented in an objective manner under editorial judgment that trusts the reader to make up his own mind. However quixotic the bigwigs may be in promoting things their readers will never support, they owe it to those readers not to try to manipulate public opinion with blatantly slanted reporting.
Yeah, I know. It’s like saying politicians should keep their promises, men should always be faithful to their wives, and nobody should ever blow up a building full of innocent children to make a political point.
But you’d think an intelligent publisher would at least insist his news reporters try to maintain the appearance of objectivity. After all, if you’re really going to try to manipulate public opinion to get people to support things they don’t want, it’s counter-productive to let the reader see up your sleeve.
The only logical conclusion is that there’s a stupidity epidemic in our nation’s newspaper offices. Somebody call the Centers for Disease Control.
