Ready to Rumble: Big Corn vs. Big Sugar

And here I thought sugar was, well, just sugar. Wrong. The sugar and corn industries are now locked in battle over what is, and isn’t sugar. Perhaps the best approach is to forget the argument over the label and realize that if someone is concerned about calories and obesity, try eating less and exercising more.

The fight began last year when Corn Refiners Association, a trade association, proposed changing the name of high-fructose corn syrup to merely “corn sugar.”

The group said the new name “more accurately describes this sweetener and helps clarify food products labeling for manufacturers and consumers alike.”

But the sugar industry argued this change would be a bitter pill for US consumers and would only add to the confusion about a sweetener that has drawn criticism by some health advocates.

Will newspaper companies soon be for sale at The Dollar Store?

The New York Times Co. is selling 16 of its regional newspapers for $143 million. That might seem like a lot, but consider this: The Herald-Sun in Durham, where I was managing editor until Jan. 2005, sold to Paxton Media in Dec. 2004 for a price reported to have been in the neighborhood of $120 million.

At the time of its sale, The Herald-Sun had a circulation in the 50,000 range. The Sarasota Herald-Tribune, just one of the 16 papers the NYT Co. is attempting to dump, has a circulation of 110,000. The average circulation of the 16 papers is 27,000, and the average selling price is $8.9 million per newspaper.

The Herald-Sun sale came out to $2.4 million per thousand of circulation. The Times Co. sale, if it goes through, is at a mere fraction of that, $333,000 per thousand.

And newspaper values probably haven’t reached the bottom yet.

Another Walter Duranty Pulitzer

The New York Times has won another Walter Duranty Pulitzer Prize, it seems. Duranty, you may recall, was the NYT Moscow bureau chief during the early Stalin years who reported that Communism was working in Soviet Russia, and that all those rumors about intentional starvation and purges were just the fabrications of counter-revolutionaries. For this, he won a Pulitzer.

History has judged Duranty, and it ain’t pretty. The same can now be said for the 2010 Pulitzer won by NTY reporter David Barstow:

An April 20, 2008 New York Times story by David Barstow, “MESSAGE MACHINE: Behind TV Analysts, Pentagon’s Hidden Hand,” won a Pulitzer Prize for the explosive claim that the Pentagon had cultivated “military analysts” in a “trojan horse” campaign to generate favorable news coverage of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the terrorist prison at Guantanamo Bay.

On December 1 of this year, the Washington Times reported that an investigation by the Pentagon’s inspector general, spurred by Barstow’s reporting, found no wrongdoing, and quoted a spokesman for former defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld saying the New York Times should return its Pulitzer. But the New York Times itself did not report the Pentagon’s vindication until Christmas Day, on page A20.

My question is, how is it that a story as routine as this one, which, even if it were accurate, is just an assertion that a few calls were made to enlist support after the worst attack ever on our country, is worthy of a Pulitzer?

That pretty much says all you need to know about print journalism today. If Ben Franklin were alive today he’d probably ask that his likeness be stricken from the Pulitzer medal.

Is It About the System or the Children?

It is just plain sad and frustrating that the Chapel Hill/Carrboro NAACP is opposing the proposal by the daughter of Howard Lee – Chapel Hill’s first African-American mayor – to start a public charter school aimed at closing the achievement gap between white and minority kids. Take a few minutes to read the NAACP’s opposition letter and I think you’ll conclude that defenders of the status quo seek to protect the system at the expense of innovations and innovators that seek to help kids left behind by a one-size-fits-all traditional approach to learning. What a shame for the kids.

More Bigotry and Intolerance From the Left

Religious bigotry shows itself again, this time from one of the most well known and celebrated Leftists in this country. It is quite odd that the Left loves to claim to be the defender of tolerance and inclusiveness. Hogwash.

Warning: both the language and the message are vile.