The Saint Louis Post Dispatch is St. Louis’ only major daily newspaper. It’s not a very good paper, and tilts alarmingly to the left (though many a leftist also dislikes it). While I would have canceled my subscription long ago, the Other Fearless Leader has informed me that because we save more in coupons from the paper than we spend on it, we are not cancelling. Tightwad that I am, I have complied. At the last Midwest Blogbash, the idea of a PostWatch site was discussed and quickly dismissed because somebody would have to actually read it reguarly.
This morning over my breakfast, I felt compelled to write a couple of letters to people at the post. The first was over an article about the drop in City homicides. I sent the following letter:
I’m glad to read that homicide is down across the St. Louis Metro area. I found it odd that the focus of the article was on the city of St. Louis when, as you relate in the last quarter of the article, it showed one of the lowest homicide rate decreases. I suppose it is to be expected that the police and prosecutors pat themselves on the back, but it isn’t clear that the other jurisdictions are doing the same thing as the city and thus it isn’t clear that the undoubtedly fine police and prosecutorial work is the cause. Perhaps a follow up article could shed more light on this.
That’s right, the article was all about how the City of St. Louis had a big drop in homicides, had quotes from prosecutors saying what a great job the prosecutors were doing and how the locals and feds were cooperating, had quotes from the police about how their aggressive police work was paying off. And then at the end they let on that St. Louis County had a larger drop in the homicide rate, along with the all the neighboring counties in Missouri. No back pats for these guys, though.
Then, a headline for a front page article set me off (I can’t give a URL for that because the miserable Post website only puts selected articles on the net), and here’s my letter for that one:
I noticed on today’s front page a sub heading about the suicide bombing in Iraq says “attacks across nation intensify”. In what way have they intensified? Are they more frequent, more deadly, involve larger numbers of attackers? Given that it is over an article about a repeat bombing that wasn’t as bad as the first one, it seems to be particularly inappropriate. I’ve been reading that the attacks have been intensifying ever since early May, shortly after President Bush declared an end to major combat operations. This is odd, since just before the intensification process started we were fighting a major war. I have yet to see a chart showing the intensity of combat versus time in Iraq, yet many media outlets tell me over and over that the attacks have intensified. Quite frankly, not only is it not supported by anything in the article, I don’t think it’s supported by the facts in Iraq. Please keep the headline(s) closer to the facts of the article.
I’m sure I’ll get a nice email blah blah blah but nothing will change. The Post gives me a choice – either get my news off the net, or get my news from late night talk hosts.
UPDATE: No replies to my email so far, but Andrew Sullivan linked to an oped in the NYT that claims attacks have declined from an average of 25 a day in July to about 15 a day today – still too many, but certainly refutes the claim of “intensifying attacks”.
#1 by ArchPundit on September 23, 2003 - 11:09 pm
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I think I have my P-D bashing credentials, but while the article didn’t cover it very well, the County police and McCullough have been meeting as well as the St. Clair County police and federal prosecutors. I don’t know about Jefferson and St. Charles, but there samples are pretty small anyway.
The coordination is an ongoing project in many urban centers from what I understand. Certainly, some of it is luck, but the strategies appear to be working–not to mention there is a lot of crossover violence between North City and North County. So, it could have been spelled out better, but it wasn’t too bad. That isn’t exactly ringing praise is it?
#2 by Kevin Murphy on September 24, 2003 - 11:59 am
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I think we’re in agreement. It’s almost as if the Post was so happy with the news that homicide was down in the City (which is clearly good news) that they rushed off this article. Because the first three quarters is fine – and then they put in the context of what’s going on in the surrounding area, and if the city police and prosecutors are doing a good job, then so to are every body else in the surrounding area (which may well be the case) – so where are their self congratulations? And they don’t make a big deal out of it, given the conventional liberal nostrum that we need new gun control laws, but Scott Decker seems to credit the emphasis on enforcing existing gun laws as being significant.
I probably wasn’t clear, but I simply thought that the frame of the article should have been on the drop in homicides in the region, and not just the City.
Realistically, the first article isn’t all that bad and the second article/headline is a beef with far more than just the Post. So they aren’t particularly good examples of why I think the Post is bad, they’re just ones I emailed them about (I’m always looking to recycle my material).