The Smirkery Gnus is a large city newspaper that wins awards every year but the paper is filled with typos because no one reads it, they just yews computer Spell Czech. Even worse is the content of the articles.
Their Editor-in-Chief was once asked, "Who is responsible for editing the newspaper?" His answer was that it was done by committee. What he didn't say was that the Smirkery Gnus does is use focus groups to tell it how to put together a newspaper. It is therefore edited by an amorphous committee that has no responsibility!
Here are some examples that show college degrees are wasted on journalists (Robert Hutchins, President of the University of Chicago, eliminated journalism as being a vocational course) and no one on the staff actually reads the paper.
The Smirkery Gnus is like other newspapers in that they have useless Frontpages. Typically they will have about one fourth of the front page or more containing non-news items such as retirement of local sports hero, old news about an unsolved crime years ago, someone who has trouble with a government agency but only one single case is reported, or other stories with only Soap Opera value.
Take the retirement of local sports hero as an example. This is not front page news at all but despite that there is an entire section devoted to sports (except for the Wall Street Journal) and the same story will appear there. If the purpose is to show a hero, and it never is but is really a soap opera story, then why not show a real hero. A Nobel Prize winner dies on the average of every 4-6 weeks. That would be a better story with the additional value of being different every time and educational to boot.
The reason for this is the desire to sell newspapers by appealing to the boob-oisie. Wouldn't it be better to fold the front page in after the want ads so those people interested in the world and important issues can find something to read? Then put the sports section on the front and be honest about it. Why even pretend to the level of H.L. Mencken or William Allen White.
H.L. Mencken not just your garden variety great man; he was the firebrand individualist who reinvented journalism, upended politics, beat the complacent linguists at their own game, terrorized the sincerely pious, and fumigated the halls of literary criticism. A man whose words, a half-century after his death, continue to shape the way we think.
William Allen White and his son, William Lindsay White, owned and ran The Emporia Gazette, a small-town Kansas newspaper, but attained national prominence for their writings, interest in politics and dedication to the Emporia community.
There have not been any of that kind in maybe fifty years!
Today, Journalists are more like suspence writers. Look at an important front page article and you will have to read forever to find out what it is really about. Here is an example:
None of these commuters can guess the importance of what those men are doing, they are looking at a monitor that indicates the dam will fail by 10 A.M. this morning, flooding the entire valley and probably destroying all the buildings between the freeway on the east side and the (continued on page 21).
Turning quickly to page 21 when they reach the office, the commuters will find there is no page 21 but instead the story is found on page 12.
One of the typical'Soap Opera' style stories by the Smirkery Gnus is about Missing girls. This will get a front page headline and be more prominent the younger and the prettier the girl. Often, it will turn out the girl met a guy at the mall and spent the night with him but that doesn't matter. a good Missing Girl story can run for months, even years. People will form community watch teams and any girl late from cheerleader practice that ends at 4:30 will have overtime policemen searching by 7! This is a story that looks through the wrong end of the telescope.
Every week on average there are ten kids kidnapped from thier home and murdered. Six of these will be killed by parents or close family members while the other four will be killed by strangers. About one hundred thousand kids are kidnapped every week but are not known to be killed by a parent or family member. Another five hundred thousand kids every week are considered runaways. This is a large number of runaways. Assuming a child has to be ten years old to runway further than the corner and that 18 is the end of childhood, there are about 21,000,000 kids in the U.S. making this 2.5% of the kids running away every year and many do not come home for they prefer to live under a culvert, beg for food and turn tricks (both boys and girls) to get new clothes. These are the kids who need desparately to be understood but they are silenced by their number and their anonlymity. Most of the above kids will be male and a minority will be female.
So the Smirkery Gnus misses giving attention to the right sex that needs help and focuses on death while overlooking the bigger tragedy of lives ruined, parents always wondering, and kids never getting off the street.
The Smirkery Gnus will present lotsa statistics, much of which is poorly presented. A typical example is a report that unemployment has reached over a hundred thousand while five years ago it was 5%. Intesive and extensive statistics will be mixed together and seldom is the basis for the numbers, the definitions, given. Is unemployment total unemployed or just those receiving UI checks? No one knows.
Much is made of averages but seldom, if ever, is the standard deviation or the distribution mentioned. Reports that mamograms give false reports 5% of the time do not make clear that this is pretty good for laboratory tests. Many tests are worse than this. If the distribution of statistics is normal (the famous bell shaped curve), then the bottom quarter of a measure is a small quantity of cases but if it is an exponential distribution (where the highest quanitity are at the low value end) the quantities will be huge.
The Smirkery Gnus has reported a traffic jam caused by 5 gallons of Sulphuric Acid (H2SO4) spilling on the side of the road. At no time did the reporter mention that once the acid 'bit the dirt'is reacted with the soil, probably releasing Carbonic Acid (H2CO4) commonly called seltzer water, the main ingredient of Colas, soft drinks and beer. If this information had been in the story those who were delayed might wonder what all the fuss was about.
Other stories that use dubious science are reports that bags of sand sold to use in children's sand boxes contain cancer causing chemicals. This is true but the real information would be the amount of sand that must be inhaled to do any real harm. It is doubtful more than a hand full of people who go to the beach everyday of their lives ever get cancer. There are even reports that the dirt raised by farmers plowing causes lung cancer. Farmers generally survive to older ages than people in the cities. Dust can cause damage but it should be self limiting for dust is annoying.
The entire concept of posting in stores that cancer causing chemicals are sold there is questionable. Most of the chemicals are old formulas such as ammonia, or are difficult for the buyer to ingest, batteries are an expample. Remember, Mother's Milk contains cancer causing chemicals.
Focusing on death does not help improving health. It is common to limit flu vaccines to children under two and others who have problems with thier immune system. When there are reports by the Smirkery Gnus of children dieing of flu without mention of their age, medical problems and vaccination status (vaccines are not 100% effective), parents flock to doctors and insist on getting a fix. Acually it is just a vaccincation but the parents appear to doctors as addicts do who plead for an extension of their prescription.
One of the reasons to not give healthy children flu vaccinations is that flu is seldom fatal and developing an immunity is part of growing up. Serious diseases such as small pox and polio are too risky to build an immunity but most kids survive the flu. The better their immunity the better their health will be later in life.
The Smirkery Gnus can even get sexual harrassment wrong. At Stanford University, they report, a Professor of English was reprimanded for telling his class not to put off starting their term paper unless they want to work 'balls out.' A girl complained of this being insulting somehow. Had it been an Engineering Professor he would have avoided the reprimand by explaining the term 'balls out' describes the governor on the shaft of a steam engine where two lead balls swing out as the shaft rotates faster thereby pulling the steam inlet valve closed. When the steam engine has 'balls out' it cannot work faster.
Another report was of the use of "colder than the balls on a brass monkey." This term, it turns out, refers to the days of sailing ships when pre-pubescent boys called 'monkeys' had the duty of carrying cannon balls to the gunners during battle. The procedure was changed later to holding cannon balls in a triangle such as used to rack pool balls. This allowed the cannon balls to be at the ready. The triangular rack was made of brass and called 'brass monkies' after their namesake, the young boys who had done the job before.
The Smirkery Gnus is adding the word 'balls' to the list of forbidden words. Does anyone know the entire list?
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