A missed headline opportunity

Derrick Pounds, a teen considered 'missing' from the Tyrone area for over a week called his mother from Moundsville. She picked up him and brought him home - end of crisis at least from an official standpoint.
The DP's news blurb was downright boring: Missing teen found in Moundsville
Where are the poets? The wags? The editors with some creativity and/or rhyming ability? It should have been:

POUNDS FOUND IN MOUNDS

Coach Who?

The Dominion Post has plumbed the depths of see-hear-speak-no-evil before. This newspaper protects its friends not by writing supportive articles but by actively suppressing coverage. Some combination of arrogance and ignorance has them convinced that they have a monopoly on news originating in Morgantown and particularly at WVU.

Who can forget the Heather Bresch scandal? Actually it was three scandals - an unearned degree awarded to the daughter of a governor, the inept cover-up of same and a refusal to observe the most basic tenets of journalism by The Dominion Post in covering the story - especially after The DP was scooped by out of state newspapers on a daily basis.

Today, intrigue surrounding the WVU football program and the head coaching position is exploding. This goes beyond blog and message board speculation - national media are doing segments and interviews. And today the DP has....nothing on the story. Oh they have WVU stories...on basketball transfers (zzz), distance runners (zzz) and a who-asked-for-it comparison of 2007 and 2010 WVU defensive units. In a paper that claims to be the go-to source for WVU coverage they have not a word about Stewart/Holgorsen/Luck.

If deliberate, it's another abandonment of journalistic integrity and obligation to readers.

If not deliberate, it is utter incompetence.

'Perfect Lady' Shouldn't Have Been Driving At All

The stretch of I-68 between the I-79 junction and the Maryland state line is gaining (or has already gained) a reputation for carnage. Possible reasons include:

1) Since the surface roads in Morgantown/Mon County are either inadequate, in a deplorable state of repair or altogether nonexistent, many locals use I-68 (and I-79) for quick hops. Moving from 35 or 45 MPH on a city street to 70+ MPH on an Interstate sounds simple enough but many of these drivers display an appalling lack of care or awareness when entering or exiting the freeway. They fail to signal, fail to accelerate adequately (many of the vehicles appear to be incapable of reaching freeway speeds) and of course fail to check their mirrors. The result is a daily series of harrowing near-misses and panic lane changes by those already in the travel lanes (and many of them aren't paying attention either) with a knock-on effect for those in the left lane and those yet to arrive at the merge point.

2) Terrain. Although Interstates are built to certain specifications with regard to sightlines, steepness of grades, etc., routes such as I-68 must pass through mountainous regions. The long hill from Exit 1 (University Ave.) to Exit 4 (Rt 7/Sabraton) is as straight as a sunbeam but its grade and length can and do cause issues for drivers who find themselves well above the speed limit (going downhill) or well below (going up) along with the usual issues of trucks carrying heavy loads effectively blocking half the travel lanes.

3) Unfamiliarity and Inattention. I-68 is the preferred route west for many traveling out of the DC area, especially compared to the expensive and constantly under construction PA Turnpike. But I-68 ends abruptly in Mon County and drivers must travel about 60 miles north (to Washington PA) in order to continue west on I-70. From their erratic driving it's clear that the I-68 terminus generates confusion (even though one only has two choices - north or south!) among out-of-state drivers (most of them sporting MD plates). For those heading home (i.e. east) to MD and beyond they apparently believe I-68 is the 'home stretch' and can be seen topping 80 MPH in the mistaken belief that it's about one hour (but in reality three) to the DC metro area.

The warm months mean migration and tourism and on this stretch of I-68 it also means a regular series of rollover accidents (especially near Exit 4), many involving fatalities.

But back to point #1. Earlier this week a 78 year old lady entered the eastbound lanes of I-68 at Exit 1 (University Ave.). She merged into the right lane. A large truck was in the left lane. This lady decided that a) she needed to be going west, b) that making a U-turn on semi-blind hilltop would be a safe maneuver and c) that she could do so without regard to any other eastbound vehicles. And so she jerked the wheel to the left attempting to reach a median crossover (i.e. the kind labeled 'for emergency vehicles only') and was immediately struck by the large truck. The driver of the truck had nowhere to go and nearly zero reaction time when this obstacle appeared in his lane.

The 78 year old woman, Nellie Kinsley, was killed, sadly. But the story doesn't end there especially when the Dominion Post is about.

Today's edition (April 6) has a front page story on Kinsley headlined 'She was perfect in every way' (a quote from a family member). The bulk of the story is typical of family members who have lost a loved quite suddenly as they remember a sunny disposition etc. But tucked among the fond farewell are some very revealing - and frankly maddening - quotes.

Her sister says "We just can't imagine how this ever happened." Well I wasn't there but I can definitely imagine how! Ms. Kinsley was operating her vehicle in an unsafe manner and made an incredibly foolish decision at a critical moment!

Ms. Kinsley's son, who lived next door, readily admits that "She shouldn't have been driving." (!?!?). But, he says, "she liked being independent" and "there was no quit in this lady." Well, that's all right then! By all means cheer her fighting spirit as she endangers lives simply by taking the wheel. If the son knew of her physical and/or mental liabilities why didn't he step in to prevent her driving, especially when he was next door?

This is not to heap scorn on a grieving family but the myopia here - reported and printed without any sort of objectivity or questioning by the DP - is staggering. What if their indulgent attitude towards a woman incapable of operating a vehicle safely, particularly at high speed, had caused the death of the trucker or caused a chain reaction accident that resulted in more injuries or deaths?

Taken a step further, instead of relying on police and EMTs called out to yet another grisly after-the-fact scene on I-68, why isn't the DMV taking a more proactive role in determining senior and/or disabled citizens' fitness to operate a vehicle? Why are untold dollars funneled to logistics and overtime for DUI checkpoints that make a mockery of the 4th and 5th Amendments while producing a miserable catch rate in terms of arrests vs. the number of cars passing through the checkpoint? Why do we see police vehicles traveling 90+ MPH while the officers chat away on mobile phones? Why do we get lectures about "aggressive driving" by otherwise capable drivers but hear very little about "clueless driving" by those making unsafe lane changes, driving too slow for conditions, impeding traffic flow, etc.?

"Accident" is a convenient catch-all term but from the family's own lips it's clear there was nothing accidental about this very preventable death.

Anybody But Tennant

Northern West Virginia has had its eight-year-long moment in the sun with one of its own as governor of the state. But Joe Manchin was always going to move into Robert Byrd's seat and the death of the longtime Senator prior to Manchin's term expiration made that succession a fait accompli.

The calling of a special election brought no fewer than 12 candidates into the frame including fellow Northerner Natalie Tennant. Still trading on her in-state fame as WVU's first female Mountaineer mascot, Tennant bided her time as a local TV broadcaster until a statewide office (job description and duties unimportant) for which she could run came open. Suddenly Tennant was WV Secretary of State and she luxuriated in visits to schools and Rotary lunches along with delivering the obligatory newspaper quotes about 'the democratic process' on Election Day.

Tennant is the classic case of the overgrown teacher's pet, kissing backsides and promoting herself shamelessly round the clock. She has taken simple name recognition devoid of any real-world accomplishment (unless you regard pogo-jumping in buckskins as accomplishment) to staggering heights. Her campaigns, slogans and speeches are embarrassingly banal and derivative even for a banal and derivative endeavor like politics. She and her sycophants advertise her as a 'game-changer' despite a lifetime of assiduosly avoiding any sort of controversy that might result from expressing deep thought or a strong position on any issue. Her experience in any industry (save reading a TelePrompTer) is nil.

In short, Tennant is the worst sort of professional politician i.e. one who views campaigns and elections strictly as an ego trip. She wants the office but not the job and is obviously convinced that any serious issue she might encounter can be jawboned into submission. As we've seen with one Barack Obama, Student Council types make horrible chief executives. Let us hope that West Virginians can apply this lesson to the current governor's race.

'Educators' and their toys

In the IT business one often acquires retired equipment, usually PCs, monitors, etc. that are well past the threshold of usability due to antiquated specs. However, with a bit of elbow grease they can be made into perfectly usable machines for users on a budget and/or those who are content to run older operating systems, applications, etc.

I once had a stable of PCs such as these and offered them to my cousin who is an elementary school principal. My thought was that they might be useful as platforms for simple scholastic math, science, history, etc. programs.

Without malice he laughed right in my face. "Have you seen our computer lab?" he replied. "We have 30 state-of-the-art machines, flat-panel monitors, the works." Momentarily stunned, I mentally added it to the list of goodies lavished upon schools that are never mentioned when teachers and their sympathizers have a moan about wages and benefits.

In Morgantown the battle is over a new school. Not just another soulless consolidation school rammed down the throats of students, parents and those paying the freight (i.e. property taxpayers) - no, this would be a new GREEN school. Not the color green, mind, but a school with all manner of energy-saving systems built with environmentally-friendly construction materials (all very well provided you don't notice the chemical holocausts foisted upon dirt-poor Chinese villages where those green batteries are made). Scratch an 'educator' and you expose a liberal which means they are still true believers in the global warming hoax. A green school, therefore, represents the apex of all their various fantasies: moral superiority, children indoctrinated into the AGW myth simply by walking through the door each day, and a show pony for school board members, district administrators and others who - let's face it - aren't terribly interested in the three R's.

Best of all, the feds are paying for it! You see, espousing the proper viewpoints on environmental issues isn't just for cocktail parties and student projects entitled 'How Mom & Dad Are Killing The Earth.' In this case it actually gets you a school built courtesy of Uncle Sam! Skylights, fluorescent lights, recirculated air, etc. But wait, you say, weren't these part of the first wave of 'new' schools built in the 60s and 70s? Why yes they were, but we didn't call them GREEN! A green school is certified by, er, experts on greenness. Their serene, benevolent knowledge of what is good for Mother Earth is self-proclaimed but when Uncle Sam's dollars are on offer you don't question the experts!

In a university town the pressure for the local school system to keep up with the college Joneses on the political correctness front is immense which is why superintendent Frank Devono was over the moon when handed an opportunity to out-green the greens on campus! You shall go to the Earth Day Ball!

There were the small matters of finding a site for the school and rounding up the students whose good fortune it would be to be photographed entering this shrine of greenness! The educators decided that two elementary schools would be closed and their student bodies consolidated into one new, vibrant green group.

In West Virginia school consolidation has been a shambles especially at the secondary level. Communities treasured their local high schools as the nexus - along with churches - of local life. The schools also had something church did not - sports. Pride in the local athletic teams and year-round displays of colors, logos and nicknames gave each small town and its residents tucked away in the mountains an identity even (or especially) when they ventured to the bigger cities.

Politicians, always looking to combine their voter base in order to make pandering an easier task, announced that school consolidation was the way forward. We can offer more programs and more opportunities, they said. National and state educational 'experts' (them again) agreed. Nobody bothered to ask the teachers, students and parents who liked their existing, if aging, schools and if they did ask the answers were ignored. Who cared if teachers did a fantastic job of mentoring students in and out of the classroom simply because they knew their families personally and felt a sense of duty beyond lesson plans? This was progress, dammit, and a sense of community identity was nothing alongside the chance to cut a ribbon in front of a soulless concrete and glass County Consolidated High School. And so community identities were stripped overnight, the usual meaningless, inoffensive generic nicknames like Eagles, Falcons, or Knights were chosen (no Applemen or Hillbillies or Farmers for them thank you very much) and the daily nightmare of busing kids across rugged terrain began. Majestic and unique architecture might have been appropriate for the first half of the 20th Century but consolidated schools relied on a bloodless, practical geometry that would have brought a tear to the eye of any good East German.

Those community high schools produced alumni with a great affection for their school, teachers and classmates and reunions are chock-full of fond remembrances. Reunions at consolidated schools, when they are held and, more crucially, when they are actually attended, have all the charm of your last trip to Wal-Mart. Sheer numbers mean that many students never get acquainted even after attending for four years - what would they have to reminisce about?

But consolidation, like green, is good, they tell us. Oh, but hang on. It seems that many parents, some of them no doubt products of consolidated schools, want to keep their neighborhood elementary! They like knowing all the kids and their parents. They like having the school within walking distance or a quick car commute. And these parents have no interest in a new school elsewhere, green or any other color.

They're bucking the system! They should be grateful that their offspring will be fodder for all those green dreams! Don't they know the oceans will boil, the skies will rain fire and the polar bears will be in for a long swim if they don't get with the program?

And then there's the small matter of a site. West Virginia isn't called The Mountain State because of one or two impressive but isolated mountain ranges. Instead, there is a sizeable hill in just about every direction. Clearing and grading land parcels for large developments like retail or schools is expensive and time-consuming. It just so happens that a large, flat parcel of land is equidistant from the two schools marked for closure. And the land is used for agronomy work by the university which means it’s already timbered and relatively flat! Surely they would part with it especially given the politically correct mission of a green school.

Oh but hang on (again). That site just happens to be adjacent to the T-junction from hell known as the intersection of the Mileground and WV Rte 705. A staggering volume of vehicles both commercial and private pass through this intersection on the way to and from the university, the hospital complex, the offices, banks and clinics surrounding them, etc. It’s not unusual to see cars stacked up in the left-turn lane for 0.5 miles (despite a total lack of oncoming traffic – it’s a T-junction after all). When they added a right-turn lane (a simple and practical act) all were so grateful that they actually dedicated it and erected a sign! Other places have entire roads and streets named after people but this particular bottleneck was so bad that they named just one lane after a person!

It’s an area, then, that sees a near-constant stream of idling vehicles, many of them pickup trucks, minivans, and SUVs – in short, a greenie’s nightmare. Anyone with or without a lick of common sense can see that adding a school with its morning-and-afternoon bus and parent-vehicle traffic to the mix will convert a bottleneck into total gridlock. Imagine waiting 20 minutes to make a left turn only to be held for another 10 minutes by a crossing guard while 15 school buses rumble out of the parking lot. 30 minutes to travel less than one mile all while burning gasoline costing $3.50/gal or more!

“Madness,” you might think and rightly so. But madness is already part of everyday life for some in the form of AGW hysteria. The site will not change. The school will be green even if it’s surrounded by very brown, black and grey shades of vehicle exhaust!

The parents (the ones who are supposedly too apathetic to care and whose role as providers of nourishment is to be supplanted by the schools) opposed to the school are challenging the establishment and location of the green school. Those ingrates are asking legitimate procedural and legal questions about the actions of the superintendent and the board. And what’s this? FOIA requests? How dare they! And so the superintendent decides – independent of any precedent, rule, law or policy – that each request will cost a nominal fee for processing, postage, etc. 35 cents here, 50 cents there. Stamps aren’t cheap, he says. But wait – aren’t these requests being filed, filled and returned electronically i.e. without the use of any paper or postal mail at all (very green, you might say)?

But it doesn’t matter to the ‘educators.’ Their show pony, their calling card, their ticket to hosannas from the greater green movement (they dream of Obama attending the grand opening but they don’t dare verbalize it yet) is being threatened, which means a serious digging in of heels. Green schools may be the future, but bureaucracy is a time-tested specialty of the educational establishment. Nobody, except perhaps the DMV or the Post Office, can sap the enemy’s morale like a front-line secretary in a government office who will demand forms, signatures, stamps, approvals, and photocopies until the enemy forgets why he asked in the first place or at least is very sorry he did so. You see, green is good. You might even say green is God to some people and they will act and react with a distinctly religious fervor when their faith is questioned.

The dramatic opening

Staff reporter Brandy Brubaker occasionally drives me to distraction with her writing style and today is a perfect example.

Headline: Downtown club loses license

"The liquor license of a downtown
nightclub has been suspended
during an investigation into the
alleged serving of alcohol to underage
patrons and an alleged sexual
assault involving a patron.

State Alcohol Beverage Control
Administration (ABCA) officials
suspended the liquor license held
by Tabu, on Chestnut Street, until
further notice, ABCA Spokesman
Gig Robinson said Monday."

Why, oh why, oh why are we forced to wait until halfway through the second paragraph to discover the name of the club?

There are only three possible reasons for this silly device:

1) It's part of AP style. To hell with AP style. AP style is boring, stilted and verbose for the sake of verbosity.
2) Purely to fill column inches i.e. 250 words of fact stretched to 500 words of prose
3) Ms Brubaker, her editor and/or others believe it adds drama, tension, suspense, etc.

I'm partial to UK newspapers for their terse, direct style. They would have identified Tabu in the first paragraph, perhaps the first sentence.

In fact, the second paragraph should be the first paragraph. In fact, the first paragraph should be struck entirely except for the mention of underage patrons and an alleged sexual assault - items which could have been incorporated into the second paragraph.

Maddening.

Stefanie Loh moves on

In a move that was kept as quiet as the relocation of the Baltimore Colts, (former) WVU football beat writer for the DP has moved up the road to Harrisburg, PA's Patriot-News. She is now writing on their high school sports (!?) and minor league baseball (!?).

A quick Google shows that this paper had advertised a vacancy and it doesn't take Sherlock Holmes to work out the rest.

One could say that Harrisburg is a larger market (if we include Lebanon, Carlisle, York, etc.) but it's in the sports wilderness given the huge Philadelphia market to the east.

College football is one subject where a beat writer can gain some traction and build a name by being associated with a particular program as the go-to person for information. It works in countless college towns in the SEC and Big 12. But the subject never changes - literally - so one must be committed to the cause.

But Ms. Loh was a West Coaster and Morgantown was almost certainly going to a be a short-term proposition for her. I'm sure there was more than a bit of culture shock upon arrival.

On balance, she did her best and it generally was good enough but the DP continues to suffer from Lack of Institutional Memory syndrome. There is nobody there - with the possible exception of Todd Murray - who can personally recall people, games, stories and other moments in Mountaineer history and this lack of historical perspective, by definition, hinders any ability to provide context for the events of the present. 'History repeating itself' and/or 'exorcising the demons of the past' are stock constructs for game stories yet the lack of experience at the DP means they can't even manage to rely on these hoary cliches.

Ms. Loh was often reduced to pumping the sunshine for the only coach she had worked with - Bill Stewart. Stewart's optimism in the face of very long odds can be endearing at times but can also be a bit maddening and Ms. Loh occasionally demonstrated symptoms of madness-by-association when defending what was, at best, a mediocre team and a string of uninspiring opponents. It was all borne out by the egg laid on the 50 yard line of the Gator Bowl (next to the flaming spear planted by Coach Bowden).

To be fair, the beat writer had a frequently thankless job by playing up the positive qualities of many WVU football recruits while ignoring or sugar-coating their shortcomings (criminal backgrounds, broken homes, children fathered out of wedlock by multiple women, academic deficiencies). One can only imagine being instructed to submit 500 words on Johnny Linebacker-loves-his-mom and attempting to make it seem compelling.

The bread-and-water rations at the DP appear to be the meal of the day, every day, and it remains to be seen if a football writer will be brought in or if musical chairs (don't forget to take one away!) will be employed to shuffle assignments yet again. Todd Murray has, either out of common sense or necessity, been assigned to spring football along with his editor Drew Rubenstein.