Life In The Age Of Inflation

Back before I took up obsessive-compulsive newspaper reading, I used to be able to say “That’s the stupidest thing I ever heard” and mean it.  As a teenager, such scorn was usually reserved for people like the Sports Illustrated writer who claimed that Howard Cosell really wasn’t that bad.  At 13, that really was the stupidest thing I’d ever heard.  Of course, back then, we didn’t get The Ledger at home.

Now that I read both the Globe and the Ledger every day, however, my day is so crowded with stories that simply beg to be labelled “stupidest ever”, that it’s become nearly impossible just to remember them all, never mind rate them.  Was that last Whitewater story a 9.95, or a 9.96?  Hmmm. 

Thus, I’ve decided to retire the title.  The straw that broke the camel’s back was the front page article from last Thursday’s Ledger describing, in fawning detail, a woman who took the bar exam a week after giving birth.  This one was a 10 right from the first sentence.  It had everything - prominent location, no subject, omissions, contradictions and exaggerations.  For extra style points it included a picture, and a prominent conflict-of-interest; the subject of the article is the wife of a Ledger reporter.

I suspect that the editor who assigned this one has been watching too much of the Olympics. 

If anything, this was an exercise in nineties-style, career-family bravado.  After all, they give the bar exam every few months.  There’s no hurry about it.  There’s also no penalty for failing.  Just take it again.  Admittedly, the bar exam is mentally exhausting, like trying to figure out what happened to the Red Sox by reading the Globe’s reverse chronological account of the game.  But it’s still not a story.  Face it, if her performance on the test was important and she walked into it exhausted, then she’s a dope.  If her performance on the test isn’t important, then there’s no story.

Now the people in this article are probably very nice.  Ledger people seem to be a pretty earnest and hardworking lot, many of them young reporters from somewhere else on their way to somewhere else.  But think about it, if this is a story, then what’s next?  “Banks That Make Change”, “Coffee AND a Doughnut, The New Breakfast Sensation”, “Local Man Goes For A Walk” or perhaps “Mariner Columnist Submits Column On-Time”?  There’s one headline, though, that you’ll still never see: “Newspaper Kills Stupid Article Despite Wasting Two Reporters And A Photographer On It”.