reality check for the daily news

underneath a photo spread laid out as if the subjects were defendants in a murder trial is the headline Let the Soaking Begin, further subtitled “Water Board’s vote makes 14.5% hike official a year after 11% jump”.

oh, the evil, moneygrabbing Water Board, stealing an extra $102/year from strapped nyc families. why, they are practically taking the food from babies’ mouths.

perhaps funds are needed to get the pharmadrugs out of the aquaduct, but that isn’t discussed in the article. (hey, what’s a little Lipitor, a little codeine? if they found marijuana in the water system, well, that would be worth mentioning — hell, they’d probably call out the national guard for that one (wait, all of the national guard is in iraq) but we all know that pharmaceuticals are harmless, don’t we?)

or perhaps it’s funding city participation in the global conservation efforts that most environmentologists have called for, but that’s not mentioned either. what? there’s no water shortage in new york? not yet there isn’t. but, as president kennedy said, the time to repair the roof is when the sun is shining.

maybe both or neither of these have anything to do with the hike; you’ll never find that out from this article, which simply denounces the increase as egregious and goes on to recite a litany of other economic screwings, from fuel to groceries (hello? maybe there’s a connection?) currently inflicted on nyc residents.

setting aside the tabloid style and sub-elementary research and reportage embodied in the piece, let’s look at its position, since as we all know location is everything in new york. so if this blockbuster gets the lion’s share of page two, the headline story must be a real ballbuster.

and ballbuster (or at least crackbuster) it is indeed: jason giambi wears a golden thong to break hitting slumps, complete with a full-page full-color photo of jason in full swing, apparently uninmpeded by the metallic strands threaded up his ass. ever the sportsman, giambi lends this selfsame thong to teammates who need some help getting back up to par. i hope it gets a good washing in between — if a mad epidemic of buttscratching breaks out in the dugout, we’ll know who jason’s friends are.

well, whatever works. it’s certainly harmless enough. but why is this, why is ANY pure sports story, ever on page one? don’t we have a back page for that?

i’m not big on sports, but i have nothing against them. games are good. people need to play, and other people need to watch the playing people and so forth. other than billions of tax dollars being squandered on stadiums and the polluting, infuriating traffic jams generated by every single game played in new york, i have no beef with baseball or any other sport. but it’s a SPORT. it is not NEWS. it does not MATTER.

but the daily news seems to think sports are more important than things like water (and that a hundred bucks a year is a bigger deal than the impending global water shortage). in the unlikely event that anyone missed the point (hell, anyone obtuse enough to miss the point probably isn’t able to read a newspaper in the first place) the little snippet of page two left over after railing at the Water Board is an article about a corrupt basketball referee, who not only bet on games that he worked, but told his friends to bet them the same way.

the top of page three is devoted to the fact that mayor bloomberg now wears contact lenses rather than reading glasses, complete with before and after photos of “hizzoner”. no comment.

startlingly, the following article is a well-written piece about some actual good that came of daily news reporting: stephanie ocana’s wheelchair had waited almost two months for repair. she can’t get around without it, couldn’t even go to school, used a skateboard for her trips to the bathroom (she’s got MS). the daily news reported it and — surprise! — the wheelchair was fixed and returned the next week. i’d like to see some follow-up on this one: how many other wheelchairs are gathering dust in this clearly incompetent (government-run and funded, of course) repair shop, who else is skateboarding around their tenement or confined to their beds or losing their jobs because of their laziness? (maybe jason should lend them his thong.)

a smiling picture of stephanie and her dad accompanies the article. i wish that had been the photo on page one.