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One of the pleasurable interludes of the forepart of my day is reviewing suburban newspapers over the breakfast table.
Aside from the fact that the Daily News, the Daily Breeze and the Long Beach Press-Telegram are commonly owned by a miser named Dean Singleton, they possess another attribute that varies from rare to invisible in these undisciplined days.
By the time I reach the back page, I have an understanding of current events in each hometown.
I don’t know whether the reporter Denise Nix of the Daily Breeze is a few years out of school or much longer in the tooth.
I do know that beneath the canopy of a headline that read “FAA settles in Torrance crash,” the lead in this morning’s edition, Ms. Nix related a magnificent story of courage, the most compelling tale to appear in any of the three suburbans or the Los Angeles Times downtown on this day.
Telling the Story — Straight
Pegging her report to a fatal crash at the Torrance Municipal Airport five years ago, she told of the greatly narrowed life that the single survivor of the crash has been forced to endure.
A student pilot, he was in a coma the first month.
Once a robust athlete, the 27-year-old former U.S. Marine has ridden a painful , unending carousel from hospital to home to hospital to home — with eight more surgeries scheduled as he shakily enters an uncertain future.
A brave fellow, he did not evince even a trace of bitterness.
The prime years of his life have been shattered into pieces, few of which are recoverable. He did end up marrying his girlfriend three years ago.
The Making of a Brave Person
Born in Hong Kong, he moved to the United States at 17, became a citizen and immediately enlisted in the Marines. He was discharged three months before the deadly crash.
“I really don’t think I would have been able to recover,” he told Ms. Nix in closing, “without my family and my wife. And also the grounding that I received in the Marines — the fighting spirit that I received and developed in the Marine Corps.”
I finished reading with a firm, proud image of the facts and the shrubbery, a strong notion of the depth of his suffering and how he has put his life back together.
Why do I tell you this?
Because Ms. Nix performed a splendid, perhaps underappreciated, service for Breeze readers.
I don’t know whether Ms. Nix is liberal or conservative, whether she eats tuna or red meat for dinner every night, whether she suspends her children from the chimney when they misbehave, or whether she thinks that John McCain and Sarah Palin are worthy of her vote in 41 days.
Those opinions do not matter.
Overnight Change
In the last few months, and speeded up this past summer, the abandonment of journalistic integrity by every large liberal newspaper in America — in its news columns — has been shocking and unprecedented.
Liberal journalists are desperate to get Mr. Obama elected, and nothing will get in the way, least of all their conscience.
The ethical sins they have flagrantly committed are too many to count — Willy-nilly they make charges against Mr. McCain and, by the hour, they slander Ms. Palin and her family. Last week on Saturday Night Alive, they accused Mr. Palin of perhaps the worst sin.
They have trampled the final moral barriers. Their attitude is, integrity is for fools.
Ever since Mr. Obama announced his campaign a year ago last February, they have worked daily to get him elected. Truth and proportionality were killed off early.
This political season is a delight for Sherlock Holmes’ fans. Every person who is on the internet, reads a newspaper, listens to the radio or television is up to his hips in damning evidence.
Still, every single liberal journalist who has spoken on the subject has virulently denied this astonishing development.
This is the apotheosis of a man caught with a woman not his wife and denying that he has cheated. With disdain, he doesn’t even bother to say well, maybe, they were practicing praying.
The once-illustrious reporter names at The New York Times have become irretrievably tarnished by misreporting about the Republican ticket while pointedly avoiding any semblance of balanced reporting about Mr. Obama.
Didn’t Anyone Notice?
When there was less gray in my hair and I was working downtown, we looked down on the suburban newspapers as an amateurish playground for those boys and girls who were raw, eager and no doubt significantly less talented than we.
We hoped they read our newspaper every morning so they, too, could become as superior as we were convinced we were.
This political season, the roles have been reversed.
The suburbans that used to be the minor leagues of journalism have bravely retained their historic integrity while the metropolitan newspapers have kicked their honor into the gutter, so spitting angry are their reporters and columnists when they come to work.
In this sad day, advocacy trash journalism — under the obscene guise of objective political reporting — daily soils the once sacred pages of The New York Times, the Chicago Tribune, the Washington Post, the Boston Globe, the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Dallas Morning News, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Los Angeles Times.
The funeral for journalistic integrity was conducted months ago. Only nobody noticed.
