by David Kopel
August 26, 2001, Rocky Mountain News
In my last column, I ranked The Sunday Denver Post book review section as the
sixth-best in the country, mainly on the basis of page count. This provoked
protests from some readers, including
Rocky Mountain News reporter Lynn Bartels, who said the column read like
an audit report. Greg Dobbs, who shares this space with me, wrote that if the
more-quantity-means-more-quality theory were true, then Playboy would be the
best magazine in the country.
Well, if Playboy isn't the best magazine in the whole country, at least it's the best "men's magazine." Because Playboy has more pages than every other men's magazine, it has room for more sophisticated articles, including its infamously long "Playboy Interviews." Of course, I only read it for the articles.
Although exceptions can be found, quantity does correlate to quality. The book reviews in The New York Times are usually much better than the reviews written in The Denver Post, but it's no coincidence that the Times book review section is three times larger than the Post's. If a publisher cares enough to dedicate 22 pages every week to book reviews, then it's also likely that he cares enough to pay for top-flight reviewers and a book review staff large enough to find them. Conversely, if The Dallas Morning News only bothers with one or two book reviews on a given Sunday, then it's doubtful that the paper cares enough to pay for reviewers who are going to write the definitive analysis of a particular book.
Letters to the Editor pages have a policy of allowing a very wide range of opinion (e.g., "Columbus was an evil man") but they try to avoid printing statements that are undeniably false (e.g., "Columbus killed all the Indians on Manhattan Island.") A recent letter to the News (Aug. 10) from SAFE's David Winkler claimed that "a 16-year-old [Coloradan] can legally drive to a gun show in . . . more truth, such out-of-state purchases, by people of any age, have been illegal since the federal Gun Control Act of 1968, long before Winkler was born.
Like chess? Then the News, not the Post, is the paper for you. Every single issue of the News has a chess puzzle, plus there's a chess column on Wednesdays. The Post, though, provides a column and puzzle only on Sundays. Frequently, the Post's chess puzzle is so badly printed it looks like the master copy was delivered via a decrepit fax machine. Since people who actually do the puzzle may spend a half-hour or more staring at a graphic that measures less than 3 inches square, it would be nice if the Post bothered with decent printing that didn't make your eyes hurt.
Both papers have had plenty of stories over the last several months about shootings by the Denver Police Department. So how come not one of those stories has contained a quote from Robert Schneider - or even mentioned the Schneider case? Schneider was a Metro SWAT trainer, one of the area's top experts in weapons and training. During a March 1998 trial, Schneider testified that Denver Police Department training on "decisional" shooting (whether to shoot or not) is inadequate. Denver Police Chief Dave Michaud and Manager of Public Safety Butch Montoya retaliated against Schneider by transferring him to a lesser job. In March of this year, a federal jury awarded Schneider $75,000. Both papers ignored the trial itself, but did report the trial's result. And that's the last we've heard from or about Schneider - despite his rather great relevance to a major public issue.
Newspapers tend to be heavily dependent on official police sources, which sometimes makes them reluctant to give much attention to police whistle-blowers.
News coverage of Welfare Field (my own name for what the Post calls "new Mile High stadium") reported that at the new stadium "the ratio of women to women's toilets" is 57-to-1, while "men have only slightly worse odds with a ratio of 100-to-1." Gee, 100 is only "slightly worse" than 57 - even though it's almost twice as much. Next time I get a ticket for driving 100 mph in a 55 mph zone, I'll remind the officer that 100 is "only slightly worse" than going 57.
