Thursday, May 05, 2005
Sometimes
The State comes really close to writing a really great article, only to throw in one or two throwaway lines of garbage that mar the whole thing.
An excellent example is
today's recount of the anticlimactic culmination of the Put Parents in Charge debate.
Jennifer Talhelm does an artful job of condensing a long, complex, heated, statewide debate into a few paragraphs of summary. For that she is to be commended. She also managed to capture the feeling of the debate on the floor. Highly anticipated as an ideologically charged debate over how to best improve our state's failing education system, the House of Representatives instead jettisoned the reform bill and turned it's back on South Carolina children.
Talhelm captures it all. Bravo! But then comes this train-wreck of a paragraph:
[Opponents] feared it would help only white, middle-class parents, leaving poor minority children behind in underfunded schools.
How is it possible that a bill that does not discriminate by race; that includes scholarships and extra allowances for the poor; and that does not affect public school funding could do any of these things? Again,
read the bill.
I understand that it is Talhelm's job to report what is said and not to take a side. But does that mean that she must report whatever comes out of some muckety-muck's mouth, no matter how ridiculous? If the anti-parent oppositon to
Put Parents in Charge said that PPIC would put the Klan in charge of South Carolina—
these dopes have made similar claims—would Talhelm report that, too? At what point is something so ridiculous, so divorced from the truth, that no newspaper should stoop to reprinting the odious twaddle?
Posted by Bill Smith at 10:03 AM |
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