The following is an excerpt from OpinionJournal.com’s “Best of the Web” written by the editor, James Taranto.
You’d Think He’d Tap Someone STRICT
“Obama Taps LAX Official for Homeland Security Post”–headline, Los Angeles Daily News, Sept. 11
Key Kerfuffle Is Fit to Print
At a time when the news business is in financial peril, it’s good to see that some journalistic institutions still have the resources and the devotion to travel long distances to get a story. The New York Times goes all the way to Mount Vernon, Wash., barely 50 miles from Canada, to gather this important news:
In a ceremony here on Sept. 26, [Glenn] Beck is to receive the symbolic key to the city of Mount Vernon, a small logging town when he lived here as a boy and now a Seattle bedroom community of 31,000.
Yet the question many residents here are asking is whether giving Mr. Beck the key–a decision made unilaterally by Mount Vernon’s mayor, Bud Norris–is the right thing to do. It is far from clear that the people of Mount Vernon, where the demographics have shifted since Mr. Beck left as a teenager in the 1970s, are still all in it together.
“Why him?” many people wonder. “Why now?”
In case you’re wondering “Who he?,” Glenn Beck is what the New York Times was as recently as a year ago: the leading journalistic adversary of the administration in Washington. It was Beck’s exposé that forced the resignation of President Obama’s “green jobs czar,” Van Jones, over Jones’s crackpot views. Obama carried Washington state handily and remains popular in Mount Vernon, and liberals, who pride themselves on their tolerance, often have a strong antipathy toward those who hold differing political views. Hence the kerfuffle.
Speaking of Van Jones, as we noted yesterday, the Times didn’t even cover that story in print until after his resignation. Managing editor Jill Abramson explained that the paper was “somewhat short-staffed” and that “Mr. Jones was not a high-ranking official.” Of course Beck isn’t an official at all, and apparently the Times isn’t too short-staffed to send someone to the distant reaches of the Pacific Northwest to cover a controversy over a meaningless award to him.
But hey, who are we to say what’s fit to print?
We notice, also, that the Van Jones story is not mentioned at all in the story about the key kerfuffle. The reporter probably gets his news from the New York Times.
For more “Best of the Web” click here and look for the “Best of the Web Today” link in the middle column below “Today’s Columnists.
