Whatever Happened to Reporting the News?

The link associated with the title for this post is to a story on the website for NBC 4 in Columbus, Ohio. The headline screams "Teen Arrested For Allegedly Selling Self As Sex Slave"! (exclamation point added). Anyone bothering to read the story, or more accurately sucked in to doing so based on the headline, discovers this is nothing more than a run of the mill prostitution tale involving an entrepreneurial 16 year old girl getting a jump on the summer job market.

The story prompted the following email to the station. Not that it will change practices in Columbus, Ohio, or anywhere else, but wouldn't it be nice . . .?

Is there any remote possibility that journalistic ethics will ever again rear its head in this country?

I read your story online entitled "Teen Arrested For Allegedly Selling Self As Sex Slave". What followed was a garden-variety prostitution tale. The fact that a 16 year old was the prostitute is slightly unusual, but in today's world hardly constitutes "news", unfortunately.

It is the extensive use of hyperbole and the agenda driven selective presentation of facts that have made the majority of media outlets in the United States unreliable sources of information at best. It would be refreshing to find a news source, somewhere, someday, that simply reported the facts regarding a story and left it up to the consumer to draw their own conclusions concerning the implications of those facts.

The Five W's - anyone remember them from journalism school? Or were they purged from the curriculum immediately after integrity?

Where's the Beef?

An AP story encountered Sunday online at MSNBC (linked in the title above) shrieked in horror that "About 1 in 10 inmates released early from Los Angeles County jails were arrested and charged with new crimes while they were supposed to be behind bars, a newspaper reported Sunday."

The story recounts how 16,000 early releasees, including 16 who murdered, were rearrested. The message from city attorney Rocky Delgadillo is "That puts us all in peril."

What the story does not do is offer a bit of perspective. If 16,000 represents the number who couldn't be trusted to behave responsibly, that also means 144,000 did take full and proper advantage of a second chance. The Men's Central Jail in Los Angeles (http://www.lasd.org/divisions/custody/mcj/index.html) reports an average daily cost of $53.45 to house an inmate. At little simple math yields a figure of $19,509.25 annually, or $2,809,332,000.00 for the 144,00 inmates released who chose not to return the taxpayer funded lodging establishments. It is true that not all facilities in Los Angeles carry the same costs as the Men's Central Jail, but even if the systemwide average were dropped to a very generous assumption of $38.05 per day that is still $2 billion that taxpayers don't have to come up with.

Certainly mistakes are made on occasion, and people who should be kept behind bars are released. That is the nature of our judicial system, which would prefer a hundred guilty be wrongly exonerated rather than a single guilty person be wrongly convicted. Such a system forces our police and prosecutors to perform their duties more effectively, and protects us all from the possibility of persecution by a capricious government. That is a protection we all must vigorously defend even, if not especially, in a "post 9-11 world".

If this were still the 1980's, you can bet Clara Peller would be demanding to know "Where's the beef?"

Lost in Translation

A rose by any other name may be just as sweet, but the same cannot be said of temperatures.

I am currently on a job site in Canada. Those of you who are not Americans will naturally understand this, but for the benefit of those who are let me explain that in Canada they use a different system of weights and measures than that employed in the States. Canada has embraced the metric system, and there are some potentially dangerous differences between Centigrade temperatures and the Fahrenheit numeric equivalent.

Last night I thought it might be pleasurable to partake of the in room sauna. One hundred twenty degrees seemed warm, but not intolerably so. After about ten minutes of pre-heating I stepped in.

The first thing I noticed was the difficulty breathing. Hot, dry air has that effect so I was not terribly surprised. Alternating between searing my nasal passages and drying the inside of my mouth I managed to take in enough oxygen to stave off unconsciousness.

Soon after, I noticed my ears were hurting. Everyone is familiar with that pain in the ear canal experienced on a cold Winter day. This pain was the same, but there was a decided lack of chill in the air. After a few more minutes of tolerating the discomfort I finally removed my glasses - and quickly dropped them as the metal frames were burning my fingers. Ear problem solved!

Increasingly uncomfortable, gasping for air, and no longer able to see as well as I might hope, I persevered. I was going to enjoy my full thirty minutes doggone it! Shifting on the bench I returned to the book I had brought with me to pass the time. Two pages passed. Three pages. Five. At last it could no longer be denied: The book was strangely unpleasant to be holding. Not quite burning my fingers perhaps, but closer than any book should ever come to doing so.

Enough was enough. With ten minutes remaining in my planned half hour of relaxation I admitted defeat and fled the sauna.

As I cooled off a short while later with a beer and a bathtub full of hot water, it occurred to me that the sauna thermostat was calibrated for Centigrade, not Fahrenheit. A slow, and belated, conversion confirmed what I should have realized all along.

One hundred twenty degrees Centigrade, far from being slightly uncomfortable, is a blistering two hundred forty-eight degrees in "real" temperature!

And While We're Busy Being Politically Correct . . . .

Chuck Shepherd's News of the Weird this week quoted a November 29, 2005 Boston Globe report that brought politically correct whining to a new low:

At the Nov. 14 meeting of the governing board of Provincetown, Mass., Selectwoman Sarah Peake raised a formal objection to the continued presence of the historical painting that graces the board's meeting room, though it is of a previously uncontroversial scene of Pilgrims voting on the Mayflower Compact. Peake's objection (according to a November report in the Boston Globe) is that there are no women in the painting.

Ms. Peake really needs to get a grip. If there is not enough to keep her busy - or hold her interest - in conducting the business of the governing board of Provincetown, then perhaps they either need a new member or a reduction in membership.

If she wants to get worked up over the inequities and indignities suffered by women at the hands of callous government, she needs look no further than her pocketbook. Sarah should start a movement to boycott US currency and coinage until women are fairly and equitably represented. All those dead presidents are MEN! Even the few guys that weren't presidents are men. The only representation of the fairer sex on US money is on the rarely used and effectively uncirculated dollar coin (Lady Liberty's appearances can hardly be counted). Susan B. Anthony and Sacajawea (Sacagawea) are relegated to being "honored" on coins that no one wants! Why not just praise their fantastic personalities while the US Mint is at it?

I'll sign on with Sarah if she wants to refrain from all use of cash until such time as women get real estate on the front side of a few paper bills. Certainly U. S. Grant and Andy Jackson wouldn't mind making way for a noble cause!

And I may be mistaken. I have not examined the portrait extensively, but it is possible that the reverse of the two dollar bill has a cleaning lady hidden somewhere amongst all those dignified signers of the Declaration of Independence. Then again, that is another US monetary instrument that few beyond hard core collectors have any great interest in.

And if the cleaning lady is there, she's probably an illegal anyway . . ..

Will This Really Make Anyone Feel Better?

Zacarias Moussaoui is hardly the sweet sort of boy you would like to bring home to meet the parents. His comments and escapades both inside and outside the courtroom are far from acceptable to even the most tolerant norms of most individuals, particularly here in the United States.

But is potentially putting him to death going to make anyone feel better - or create the least deterrent effect for future terrorists?

Of course not.

The Moussaoui trial is a Big Top event put on by the government. He is the designated sacrificial lamb being offered up so that Washington can crow to the peasantry "See? We are doing something!"

He did not participate in the 9/11 attacks. Not because he did not wish to, but because he was already in custody. The reason he should be put to death? Because he didn't spill his guts to the FBI and tell them everything he knew about the impending attacks.

In short, he did not do the FBI's job for them.

By this logic, every criminal convicted in the future should then be charged with the follow-up crime of failure to drop a dime on himself before the act. "Uh, yeah. Happytown Police? I'd like to report that I'll be robbing the Second Local Bank and Hardware Emporium next Thursday afternoon at 2:47. Please don't be late."

Could he have prevented tremendous destruction and loss of life? Certainly. Did he actually cause that destruction and death? No. He has done plenty to find himself incarcerated for the remainder of his life, no matter how long that might be. Let the punishment fit the crime committed, and be content with justice being served.

Putting him to death because he knew about plans to use a "weapon of mass destruction" (can anyone find an incidence of that term being applied to an aircraft prior to 9/11?) but didn't share is little less than murder in the name of serving the national hunger for revenge.