Thousands Left Homeless

It's news to you, but to a copy editor, it's just the same old story

I was a part-time newspaper copy editor for 17 years, beginning
in 1980. This is a fictionalized account of that experience.

             
           (2011)  The newspaper’s “metro room” seemed designed expressly to spare reporters the sights, sounds and smells of real life. It used to be that if you were writing the weather story, you could look out a window to ensure that your account had some relationship to the actual out-of-doors. But all the windows had been covered for better "climate control,'' so you relied on the telephone “weather line”  and wire service forecasts that might well say ``cloudy, windy and cold today,'' when in fact it was clear and sunny.

    Where reporters had once scrambled out at the sound of sirens, crashes, booms and screams, they now reposed in a surreally quiet suite that insulated them from anything short of a major earthquake or direct nuclear attack.

NPR's purple prose shows little mettle

   Wow, NPR reporters finally did some investigative reporting this morning! They had to have someone to hold their hand, though, so the excellent ProPublica team was brought in to help uncover a TERRIBLE SCANDAL: Some soldiers who get concussions are not receiving Purple Hearts. 
   Surely NPR could have found an injustice somewhere in the world -- and probably in any American city -- that is more worthy of what little investigative energy it has.
   More than 45,000 Purple Hearts have been hauled out

Narcissistic NPR deserves its "whiny critics"

   Yesterday, Slate writer Farhad Manjoo called NPR critics "pseudo-intellectuals" and "the stodgiest, whiniest, most self-importantly insufferable snobs of all time." (that sounds like a description of NPR's top personalities to me)  
   They "see NPR as their own," he added, "a 'safe,' high-minded palace that should never be sullied by" popular culture, celebrity scandals and other lowbrow, sensationalistic ephemera.
   I agree for the most part with those whiny people.