Ace Weekly/letters to the Editor

I always read the Sunday paper.

Reading the local daily doesn't feel like heresy to me. (Sure, if we lived in a Gannett town, the practice would be offensive, nay odious... but we don't.) So in answer to the multitude of questions we were all asked in advance of the new weekly schedule: No, I don't see the daily paper as competition. Not because of the obvious David and Goliath math (we have 50,000+ readers a week and they have... I don't know... probably more than that), but because we have one job to do and they have another.

Editorially, both jobs are important, but essentially and necessarily different. A good daily, for example, is able to faithfully and amply supply readers with a dose of Who/What/Where/When every morning, while a good weekly can accurately articulate the Why.

That's why it was surprising to see so much of our mission as a weekly expressed by a daily columnist widely considered to be - how to put this nicely? - an unskilled, ill-informed, unkind, right-wing, religious (but none-too-Christian), ignorant, biased, bigoted, purveyor of conservative wingnut zealotry.

Ninie O'Hara (recently chided by Ace's own In Media Res, in what could be considered a spectacular case of shooting fish in a barrel) is really no more than Dr. Laura-Lite. Both might be vaguely annoying (O'Hara's a gnat; Schlessinger's more like a mosquito)... but neither is especially dangerous (like a rattler).

O'Hara's newsflash this past Sunday was that journalists are different from the rest of America (and should be stopped!). She quoted John Leo's complaint (in U.S. News and World Report) that "the gap between the reporters and the general public is huge." According to her (and a vaguely-cited, but purportedly statistically significant Orlando Sentinel study of five small cities and the Dallas-Fort Worth area): journalists are "more likely to rent foreign movies than High Noon" (oh my); more likely to "read Architectural Digest than Reader's Digest" (let's hope); and more likely "to identify strongly with people who see themselves as victims of society" (the crux of the "comfort the afflicted; afflict the comfortable" mission of ink-stained wretches everywhere - standing up for the poor/tired/hungry/yearning-to-be- free rabble that O'Hara has no time for).

She also makes wildly unsubstantiated (and frankly reckless and irresponsible) claims, such as that journalists are more likely to "drink Chablis than beer or whiskey" (when everyone knows Chablis is the lambrusco of the white wine world, and no self-respecting writer would go near the stuff).

On a more serious note, she takes time to gay bash, arguing that homosexuals get preferential media treatment, citing as examples the nationwide coverage of Matthew Shepard's murder, while lamenting the lack of national coverage when "two homosexuals were charged with...the kidnapping, torture, and murder of an Arkansas boy."

She calls this "distortion," but editors have to make reasoned judgments about what constitutes news everyday. Sometimes they get it wrong (witness MSNBC's all-Elian/all-the-time debacle), but Shepard's crucifixion did meet the standard. The same way a black man getting chained and dragged to death in Jasper, Texas was news. (Unfortunately, black men are murdered everyday in Texas and everywhere else. They are not, however, lynched quite as frequently as they used to be -not even in the south, and not even in Texas. Hence: national news.)

She seems convinced that this wacky pro-minority, pro-gay, anti-child bias can be laid squarely at the doors of the (honestly, still largely theoretical) multicultural newsroom.

According to O'Hara, "Readers need to let [editors] know it's time they stopped filling newsrooms with the politically correct ethnic/gender mix and concentrated on hiring reporters whose news judgments reflect the values of 'normal' people."

Of course if her bigoted recommendation were acted on, there would be some perverse satisfaction in the fact that it would cost O'Hara her job. Because what's "normal" is a bunch of middle-aged, conservative, church-goin', God-fearin', white guys. (And we can certainly all see how well that demographic served us in the General Assembly this year.)

Kooks, spooks, gooks, kikes, dykes, and freaks need not apply in a "normal" world.

As one letter writer (above) asserts, it's possible that the opinions of people like O'Hara are published in service of "diversity." I'm not buying it. I've long secretly suspected that the daily brass has taken on the O'Haras and Dr. Lauras of this world because they secretly enjoy giving the religious right ample rope to hang themselves. (C'mon, nobody gave 'em a Pulitzer for stupidity.) And I, for one, applaud such wily subversiveness.