Today's Seattle Times editorial is on the right side of the charter school argument, as the Times editorial page has consistently been:
The state's largest teachers union has decided to challenge the new charter-school law. What a waste of time and money. All the effort to get voters to overturn the law will do nothing to improve public education in this state.Indeed.
The worst of Times
Today's lead editorial, "The troubling arc of media concentration", is more self-interested than it is factual or sensical:
Five owners now dominate American television: Viacom, which owns CBS; Disney, which owns ABC; News Corp., which owns Fox; General Electric, which owns NBC; and AOL Time Warner.In other words there are two more news networks than in the good old days of the "Big Three Networks". And then there's the sixth major TV news outlet, PBS. Some might think that a doubling of nightly news shows is an ominous sign of concentration. Others might disagree. And if the Times is so concerned about concentration in the news business, why is it trying to shut down the only other daily newspaper in town?
Floyd McKay's op-ed column is almost always one of the worst things to appear in the Seattle Times and today's column is no exception.
Today's front page story on the recent wave of violence in Uzbekistan refers to the suicide bombers as "alleged terrorists" and "suspected terrorists". Not to jump to conclusions or anything...
Posted by Stefan Sharkansky at March 31, 2004 11:04 AMYawn; Chicken Little. TV news is dying, anyway.
"...there are way more than five or six. The online list maintained by the Columbia Journalism Review currently includes 45 firms, ranging from Viacom and Time Warner to outfits most people have never heard of...45 companies sharing the U.S. media pie is a lot different from slicing it up into just half a dozen pieces." --from http://www.straightdope.com/columns/040227.html
Posted by: cornflux on March 31, 2004 01:46 PMThe only part of the Times editorial on the WEA's assault on charter schools that's wrong, sadly, is this sentence: "Surely the union has more important work to do." It doesn't. Maintaining its iron grip on public education IS the most important work it has to do. If there was any doubt about that before, there shouldn't be now.
Posted by: J. Archer on March 31, 2004 03:28 PMI've always wondered why the Times runs Floyd McKay. Are they trying to make the point in the reader's mind that all journalism professors are extremely ideological and paranoid?
Posted by: Greg Piper on April 1, 2004 02:18 PM