Apropos the previous post: Who might be smaller than me? Maybe the Trib.
I enjoyed this self righteous line from the Finger editorial.
“Raised fingers and hard feelings aside, what this entire situation screams for is strong, grown-up behavior. And for someone to point out the obvious — that the district needs to apologize to Kuiti for bulldozing land he still owns and that Kuiti needs to apologize to Grover for his less-than-friendly hand gestures. Kuiti and the district could then get back to negotiating the land sale so the Piedmont school project can continue to move forward.”
So what examples have the editors of the Trib set in the past? Here are two that stick out.
Chuck Frederick is a very agreeable guy, especially when he sticks to human interest stories, used his bully pulpit on the Editorial Page a year ago to criticize the Arch Diocese of Duluth for firing a very popular parochial school principal.
As a parent myself I can appreciate the temptation to use his position as a Trib employee to second guess the Catholic Church which seems completely inept these days. Perhaps the firing should have been widely and publicly denounced. I’m just not sure that Chuck was the one to do it or that he did his reportorial due diligence. Some of the folks who defended the decision raised points which the journalist Frederick seemed not to have considered. In this way Chuck used his power much like a high school reporter who uses his/her position to embarrass a fellow student.
A more egregious actual editorial slipped past Robin Washington some time before that. His Rabbi was an adoptive mother and, gasp, gay. She also is no doubt a better singer than Robin, an incisive thinker, and she probably knows Hebrew better than Washington. She was pulled over driving home from a friend’s house and found to be a hair above the newly lowered alcolol limit. Her child was on board at the time in a car seat.
Every week the Trib is full of notices of people who have been pulled over for DWI’s. Perhaps this event, considering the situation and the driver, was worthy of a small story but that’s all – maybe. When I read the damning editorial that followed it too reminded me of the abuses you might find in a high school newspaper. I couldn’t help but wonder if there was something about the Rabbi that got under the Editor’s skin so that he felt empowered to bring her down a notch.
I don’t know about you but if I had my druthers I’d rather have an irritated citizen flip me the bird for some failure on my part than read about how reckless I was with my child in an editorial in the local rag. Its called the power of the press with good reason. Its a damn shame to see it abused.
I wonder if the Trib’s editors are big enough men to offer apologies when they are warranted.
