The Portrait of Dorian McCaw

It's seeming more and more possible that Wendy McCaw uses the same older, more flattering photo of her younger self because she's actually stuck in a time warp. Perhaps hoping to short circuit a broadcast on Los Angeles' KCRW's "The Politics of Culture" today with Lou Cannon and Jerry Roberts (everyone invited from the News-Press declined), she instead offered up over 2200 words on line (and a shorter version in print). And she meant it so much she didn't even hide it behind the pay wall.

Now, one could go through this line by line (pretty much word by word) and pick it apart, but we all have lives and better things to do like dishes, or vacuuming, or nodding off to bad TV. Suffice to say it offers lines that must make Stanford cringe unless their blonde alum writes hefty enough checks. For instance:

You [the rant is addressed to Lou Cannon] assert you are beholden to no union, yet your words mimic the antics of a Union with the gravest history of corruption in its campaign against the News-Press and me as its owner.

OK, I can put up with the inconsistent capitalization of union, but how do words mimic antics? And while she wants, as always, to drag Jimmy Hoffa back kicking and screaming from the Meadowlands or wherever he's buried when discussing the Teamsters, note how that history of corruption immediately connects with a campaign against the N-P? And, of course, poor poor pitiful Wendy.

It's also striking to note her disdain for journalism itself (well, at least journalists--remember, she's an animal lover, not a lover of humanity), a very odd position to take if you actually own a newspaper. I mean, you don't hear the president of ABC say how horrible television is. But instead, she writes things like this:

The world has passed you by. Young people today no longer wear watches, no longer read newspapers, no longer watch TV news.

Here's hoping whatever folks she can still get to work for the shell that was the News-Press can understand how much youth culture is monolithic and stereotypical and more or less dreamed up by someone like Grandpa Simpson.

But separate from her inability to write a sentence, carry on a logical argument, avoid strawmen, and actually have some sense of the real world (no, not the Real World, dearie), there's this--she actually has the nerve to say to Cannon:

I challenge you to state a single legitimate agency "inquiry" that has found we violated a journalistic standard. None exists. It is simply more evidence why certain journalists today have committed a grave disservice to the public they claim to serve.

And, in her entire 2200+ word piece, four words never appear: National Labor Relations Board. It's as if none of the hearings, none of the past year, happened (well, they didn't get reported in the N-P so I guess they didn't). The NLRB isn't a legitimate agency? Maybe McCaw is only accountable to the mysterious fourth branch of US government run by Dick Cheney.