The Iowa City Press-Citizen stinks

I've been a loyal member of the I hate the local paper club for many years. I find their newspaper is nearly completely void of actual news and is so anti-University it is unbearable for me to read. So I stopped reading it and it has taken one source of frustration out of my life for the last five years.

We do however have a weekend subscription in which the paper is combined with the Des Moines Register which I find to be slightly less offensive. Mostly my reading is looking for human interest stories and current national or global topics. And I like to look at the pictures and see what's on sale at Menards, but I digress...

All this as background so that I can give you an example of why our local paper stinks. This photo is a scan of the UI Roundup. Let's just walk through how many ways this small and simple piece has been mutilated by the ICPC:

1. Title is "Hawkeyes Split with Wolverines". What they split I'm not sure, perhaps the last piece of pecan pie or turns changing in the locker room. Difficult to split wins and losses since they only played one game.

2. Split, in the context of wins and losses, would mean that the Hawkeyes won a game. It would be interesting to know how Iowa could have won a game yet the Big Ten leading Wolverines are 14-0 in the conference.

3. I thought perhaps they looked at a women/men doubleheader for the "split", but the men's team played PSU. The men did split with PSU, who happen to be the Nittany Lions not the Wolverines.

4. The box score: the most sterile and simple of all pieces of sports news. Impossible to screw up right? WRONG. The box score lists Iowa and Michigan State. I thought we were talking about Michigan?

And I thought the Leaders and Legends division names were confusing?!?!

I invested 5 minutes of negative energy this morning sending the sports department an email pointing out the errors and asking this: Really? Because the only question I can think of that addresses the ineptitude of the paper is: Really?

This is lesson #1 on why you shouldn't believe anything you read in the paper or see on 60 Minutes. Journalists generally suck at at their job. They are like weathermen except angrier and more liberal.

Lesson #2 on why you shouldn't believe anything you read in the paper or see on 60 Minutes is that they aren't trying to inform you. They are trying to sway your opinion to the opinion they want you to have. Which by the way they would have more success doing if they weren't such buffoons.

Go invest some time at www.fark.com or read the book It's Not News It's Fark: How Mass Media tries to pass of Crap as News. Then be cynical and untrusting of anything you read on the internet, in newspapers, and certainly on any "news" show on TV.

Yours,

Mel Gibson from Conspiracy Theory