Mark Steyn explains Journalism 101 to another winner of the Canadian Media Incest Lottery:
In normal circumstances, if you decide an event is so controversial that it has news value before it happens, you have an obligation to report on it when it happens, if only to determine whether the ballyhoo was merited. Having been given the pre-game show, readers were certainly entitled to expect the game.
That obligation is intensified when the original story has had such an impact that it put the event in jeopardy. The LFP chose to make itself part of the story, and then denied readers what Paul Harvey used to call “the rest of the story” – that the event had been moved to a bigger venue, and sold it out.
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I dunno, Mark. Rumor has it Pierre Burton didn’t really write all those damn books of his, a pretty convincing rumor given his admitted decades of pot smoking. Maybe his son just takes the same approach to running a newspaper…
As it happens, the train in and out of London, Ontario goes past the back doors of the London Free Press offices. On my trip home, I noticed a big pile of LFP street boxes gathering rust out back. If a picture really is worth a thousand words, a decent photo of that sad heap of cheap metal could serve as the LFP’s obituary some day. And some day may be sooner than they think.
