Why I Love My Local Newspaper

I will admit: I'm being sarcastic with the title.

Aside from the useless comments sections on their website, my local paper has been upping the ante when it comes to questionable content as well. The first inkling of this was a front page story on "blogs"... last week. Not in 2002. In 2009. This article harped up the angle that Dooce is popular, and one can make money on blogs via ads. Hey, it's true. Ryan and I can now afford a nice couple of pizzas with the money we've earned from the Ping.

The other piece of content was in this week's Letters to the Editor, aka The Offline Comment Section. It started out strong:

If there is anyone out there that would like to keep the sovereignty of this country from being outsourced, our rights under the Constitution upheld, and the right of American workers to work in our country, please make every effort to stop the treaty that would do so.

Okay. What treaty? The same paper hasn't covered this treaty. I read on:

This is touted to be a monstrously huge project, starting in Texas and running all the way to Canada. It is expected to be built using 200,000-300,000 illegal workers. The reason for this ‘highway” is to make Mexico economically viable.

This is also supported to help Mexico, the U.S. and Canada “merge.” We will lose our sovereignty and our rights.

Wait a minute... is this... could it be? Is it the same old stuff I've been reading on the web for years? That there's going to be a "superhighway" between the three North American countries? The one that's an urban myth? The one that will destroy America?!

Oddly enough, a Google News search found another OMG! letter about this ficticious highway from just a couple of weeks ago. It's weird, because these papers aren't actually reporting on these things and these supposed letter writers are acting as if they are real events. Just... strange.

In any case I applaud the Northwest Herald for being so bold as to do zero research on their published letters. I hope that someday soon they run an article on something called "journalism", which they appear to have stopped doing.