My Own Private News-Press

Dr. (of Physiology) Laura is back at the News-Press just in time to save the world from its greatest scourge--blogs! (As you know, there's no point in linking as you have to subscribe for such wit, wisdom, and intellectual property.) Seems she's done with the "abundance of media travel responsibilities" that most honest people would call "out flogging the new book" and ready to take on all comers in Santa Barbara. She mostly complains about anonymous comments on blogs, and, of course, having actually talked to numerous anonymi, psychoanalyzes (physiologizes?) them:

It is these very types we all have to watch closely.

Can you imagine these perpetual attackers ever really having tolerance and a diversity approach? If they ran the News-Press, would they keep me, Scott or Travis? Since they spend a lot of time salivating over the demise of the News-Press and anyone and everyone involved with it -- I think they would create their own one-sided tyranny.

First, nice slip there--"their own one-sided tyranny" kind of implies there is a one-sided tyranny right now at the N-P. (It just happens that tyranny gave Schlessinger a column, so it's a good tyranny.) Now, I'm not really anonymous (after all, there must be hundreds of Georges with two greyhounds in town), but I have to admit, if I were put in charge of the News-Press, I would be tyrannical. Call me a brutish dictator, but I'd require all my journalists, editors, and columnists to be competent. To argue using facts and not hearsay and innuendo. To understand the community about which they write. They couldn't hold grudges against enemies real or made-up. They couldn't coddle friends.

They would have to do reporting, and not just tell us what they think people think. For instance, that Dr. (of Physiology) Laura column of 3/15 begins with a rant about why she will not watch Law & Order anymore. It seems it set her off that a recent episode took the sad, sad murder of Adrienne Shelly, lamented on this very blog back when it happened, as a starting point for its plot. Here's her problem with the episode:

Last December, a woman in an apartment building in New York City was brutally and cruelly murdered by an illegal immigrant from Colombia simply because she asked him to keep the noise down a bit on his construction job downstairs. He followed her upstairs and attacked her. She didn't die then. She died when he hung her to make it look like a suicide. This was major news in New York City in December of 2006.

Here we are early in 2007, and -- with their usual "disclaimer" about it not being a "true" story -- they put the exact same scenario in one of their episodes . . . except now, the white, Christian, businessman owner of the construction company is considered the murderer because he is the one to fake the suicide hanging to protect his business.

Imagine the brutal death of your family member "retooled" so that the actual murderer becomes the victim of white, American, corporate greed.

We don't have to imagine anything, Dr. (of Physiology) Laura. We could try to contact Shelly's family (she had a husband and very young daughter) and see if the episode bugged them. Of course, then we'd actually have to mention her name in our column--but why give her that humanity. For what we really want to do is use her case a complaint about political correctness. Her death means nothing to Schlessinger--it's that it didn't get used to beat up on illegal immigrants, and instead made an argument that greedy white men are bad (didn't see the episode--did it suggest all white men are greedy? I bet).

Seems she's "retooled" the murder too, doing the very thing she's accusing the Law & Order folks of doing. Probably because she believes she's the decider about what's law and order and she hates anyone crowding in on her territory. But she's got plenty of company with Wendy McCaw and Crew, for they're the same ones who accuse everyone else of bias when they don't even report on this week's NLRB finding in their own paper.