It's time

The A.V. Club's sister publication The Onion has been trying to prove its worthiness to the venerable Pulitzer committee -- unfortunately without success.  They fought a good fight, though.  Check out videos from supporters of the cause like Tom Hanks and Glenn Beck; read some of the reasons the Onion is deserving (as well as their thinly veiled efforts at committee persuasion).  Oh, and if you're not familiar with the Onion, please remember -- it's an adult publication, complete with adult language.

The British are different from us ...

I followed a link from a tweet this morning to the blog Tabloid Watch, and spent the next twenty minutes browsing the posts to my increasing disbelief.  My awareness of British tabloid journalism and its cutthroat business model of sensationalism, celebrity gossip, and pandering to xenophobia and nativism has always been vague at best.  Reading about how many papers print screaming headlines that are intentionally misleading at best, outright bald-faced lies at worst, though, blew my mind.

The story that brought me to the site was this correction from the Daily Mail, which hilariously claimed that its story "Babies who are born at 23 weeks should be left to die, says NHS chief" was printed "in good faith.  When in fact, the National Health Service consultant in question said no such thing.

But the stories that exercised my outrage throughout the day were the repeated claims that the European Union was about to clap liberty-loving Englishmen in shackles.  Proposals to merge England and France!  Banning plastic bags!  Forcing government offices to fly the EU flag!  All examples of the tyranny of the the EU and all designed to foment outrage in the readership.  Only problem is that none of these things are true, as readers would find if they read far enough down in the stories, past the histrionic quotes from rightwing activist groups and self-appointed watchdogs, and if they can negotiate complexities of meaning beyond "EU diktat" and "EU plot exposed."

I understand that the British press is given more leeway in the civil code to print material that turns out to be false -- that it is much more difficult there to win a lawsuit for libel or slander.  But something is very wrong if papers can't be held accountable for intentionally telling lies in a breakneck race to the bottom.

Let the sunshine in

It's been a great year to be an Arkansas Democrat-Gazette reader.  As if to make up for six years of neglect (and sometimes outright complicity) in l'affaire Hardin at my university, the newspaper has gone on a FOIA tear through state government, uncovering all sorts of questionable practices, favoritism, waste, and lack of oversight.

First there were the non-retired retirees.  A few years ago, legislators worried that government offices were losing their most experienced human capital to retirement, and accordingly passed a law allowing those offices to re-hire retired workers after a short mandatory waiting period.  Whaddya know, this year the Dem-Gaz found that several highly-paid state employees had gamed the system.  They retired with the understanding that the office would re-hire them after the 90 days were up, thereby enabling them to draw both their salary and their pension simultaneously.  In a few cases, they never actually quit working -- just took their names off the payroll.

Then came the story on state vehicles.  Turns out some elected officials were being granted use of a state vehicle to commute to and from work, but weren't counting the value of use as income because of -- get this -- a constitutional provision stating that elected officials can't receive any income over and above their legally-set salaries.  If the state was giving them a car, the reasoning went, it couldn't be income, because they were prohibited from receiving any more income!

That led to a sweeping investigation by the paper of various agencies' practices regarding state vehicles, uncovering one agency with more cars than employees.

Today's exercise in truthtelling was the revelation that in Pulaski County (the home of Little Rock, the state capital), the assessor has been granting nine pastors exemptions from property taxes on the homes that they own.  The law allows an exemption for church-owned parsonages, but citing "custom," the county assessor gave it to everyone who asked whom she could verify were full-time ministers.  The fact that only nine asked is a tribute both to how few people knew about this lucrative loophole, and to how lucrative it was for those who made the effort to benefit -- their houses ranged from the $300,000 to $600,000 range (in a state where you would have to search long and hard to find a $600,000 house).

I take great delight in these investigations.  They are Arkansas newspapering at its finest: uncovering unfairness, waste, and profiteering in practices that people justify based on the way things have always been.  Long live local journalism!

Shrinkage

Today the Arkansas Democrat Gazette shrunk by half a column in width. That's not necessarily surprising, in these days of economic woe for the industry. Many other papers have taken the same measure recently; some took it some years ago; others have been forced to more drastic cuts.

What's strange is that the paper itself seems to contain no notification of the change. Not on the front page, not on the op-ed pages, not in the local news section, not in business. The result is that readers all over the state unfolded their papers, wrinkled their brows, and said to their spouses, "Does this look smaller to you?"

And it happened to be the day that the managing editor publishes his weekly column. Seems like that would be a natural place to talk about the decision and explain the rationale. Instead, it's a discussion of how the Dem-Gaz and other newspapers handled the late-breaking news of Ted Kennedy's death. Interesting, but strangely removed from the fact of the skinnier newspaper one is holding in order to read the column.

I hope there will be ample coverage of the paper's finances and business decisions in the days to come. It would have been nice to have seen such coverage coincide with the tangible evidence of its contracting fortunes.