- Eraldo Peres/AP Photos
- Eduardo Campos (left) died in a plane crash on Wednesday.
As the Tribune and Sun-Times think about ways to improve their product, they might want to consider discontinuing some lines of news altogether. We the readers have a right to know, but that doesn’t put our dailies under a moral obligation to tell us. News they can’t report competently they might want to leave to NPR and the New York Times.
Not having listened to WBEZ the day before, I came to the story in the Saturday Tribune knowing nothing about it. The Tribune said Governor Rick Perry had been indicted by a grand jury for alleged abuse of his office: after the state’s attorney of Travis County had been arrested for drunken driving, Perry had tried to make her resign by threatening to veto $7.5 million in state funding for her anticorruption unit (which he did when she didn’t).
And these days who has time and staff for that? As newspapers’ print editions get more and more perfunctory, I suggest they revisit first principles. News is news, but at some point a story becomes so sketchy and slapdash that it might be better not to pretend you’re telling it at all.
