Posted 4:40 PM by Gene

Tomorrow's KNIGHTRIDDER PHILLY BROADSHEET MONOPOLY (links 2 come) pulls a double-whammy on its readers. First is a front-page story bemoaning the city's awful homicide rate in ghetto neighborhoods. And that's all it does. One suspects that for weeks the cloistered suburban-dwelling IDIOTS on the Editorial Board debated whether to endorse solutions and decided against it because it might mean an increase in -- POLICE BRUTALITY. God knows NEWS HACKS have made enough righteous bad suggestions on how to improve things, but an article that whines and kvetches without advancing solutions doesn't have the dignity of being useless; it's cynical, and worse, it posits that some problems are TOO POLITICALLY CORRECT TO BE SOLVED. If KNIGHTRIDDER'S DIMWITS think they're going to restart their string of P-Ulitzers from decades gone by with this cowardly exercise in moral evasion they have another think coming.

Second is a NEUHARTHISM OF THE WEEK AWARD WINNER -- an "A&E" piece by the paper's TV ad-blurb copywriter named Storm which shows conclusively that most articles (save the P-Ulitzer tryouts) pass from terminal to printed page without editing save for spellchecks. The guy belches in so many words that TV DRAMA IS BETTER THAN EVER!!!!! (Of course he doesn't have the guts to say THAT, but he says it.) If Harold Ross in a bad mood had met this piece of typing it would have self-incinerated on his desk. "Storm," he would have barked, "if TV's so great why aren't people watching?" The numbers he's foolish enough to throw out are generally less than five percent of the population, suggesting those viewing this BETTER-THAN-EVER TV are basically a TiVo-mad clique much like our enlightened blurbists. He further dynamites his column with this masterwork of words (have to paraphrase for now): "But like Wall Street, TV goes in cycles, and today's genius is all too likely to be tomorrow's trash." HEY BOZO! You don't SUPPOSE that would include the IMMORTALS OF ENTERTAINMENT you've just spent A THOUSAND WORDS BARKING, do you? NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO.

Oddly enough, for all its meritorious selling, it isn't the lead in the A&E section (though it's teased on the front page); that goes to a piece of twaddle by an ad-blurb copywriter once bylined Steven X. Rea who writes about the Kurosawa of ANIME. This is the guy whose MASTERWORK got distributed by ESPNCORP here in the states to huge indifference, which the blurbists ascribed to a "lack of marketing." Of COURSE it DIDN'T have anything to do with the fact that WHEN YOU'VE SEEN ONE ANIME CHARACTER, YOU'VE SEEN THEM ALL.

I repeat, TODAY'S DAILY NEWSPAPER IS NOT WORTH BUYING.