P-I Round-up

First a quiz question. Please, no cheating. Q: The Seattle Post-Intelligencer is run by: (a) liars (b) charlatans (c) whores (d) fools, or (e) mendicants.

Confused? You're not alone. It is actually a trick question. The answer is: (f) all of the above.

Let's take a tour of Tuesday's P-I. In addition to the sympathetic report on a flag-burning anti-police riot, yesterday's paper contains the following bonus nuggets of unnecessary journalism:

This story, about a Pentagon research project "to develop a digital super diary that records heartbeats, travel, Internet chats, everything a person does" under the hysterical headline Pentagon wants to record every breath you take. Well they don't. At least not your breath. Unless you happen to be, say, one these guys. And if the Pentagon really was clever enough to create a massive Big Brother system to spy on the average Seattle P-I reader, you'd think they'd also be clever enough to ensure that the Seattle P-I never got wind of it.

In the front page story After long decline, state's welfare rolls surge, the poster family representing Those Who Need Welfare Most is a widowed Somali refugee with five children. But this unfortunate woman is less a proxy for the American welfare recipient as she is a proxy for those immigrants who should be admitted only if they have someone to sponsor them.

Meanwhile, over in the business section we are told that "Experts suggest bear market may be behind us with this rally"

"We're probably on the cusp of a cyclical rise in stock prices," said David Francis, head of equities for [Thrivent Investment Management], which manages $57 billion. "We think the worst is behind us for the bear market."

This is a textbook case of the sort of financial journalism that teaches people how to do stupid things with their money -- like taking seriously the market predictions of unchallenged experts and investing one's money accordingly. The sad reality is that the only expert on the market is the one who admits that there are no experts and tells you that no honest person has any idea what the market is going to do next year.

Elsewhere in the business section we find this New York Times story about the FCC's revision of media ownership rules with the prominent subhead "Too much power in too few hands, critics charge". Not that there isn't already too much power in the mere two hands of say, Howell Raines. The P-I, by the way, is owned by the Hearst Corporation which owns 11 other daily newspapers, including the San Francisco Chronicle. If Hearst is concerned about too much power in too few hands, I'll be happy to take P-I off their hands and offer some needed, ahem, diversity (of competence) on the west coast.

Posted by Stefan Sharkansky at June 04, 2003 08:00 AM