Shallow | Center

Also, Female Broadcast Journalists Are Hired Primarily for their Looks

Here's a little public service announcement for you: I'm going to tell you in one sentence what it took Inquirer TV critic Jonathan Storm an astounding 35-plus column-inches to sputter in today's paper.

Political coverage on television -- and especially on cable -- is marked by naked partisanship and hack reporting that contribute breathtakingly little to the national dialogue we so desperately need but are not getting in these complex times.

Seriously.

Not only did this woefully obvious and completely unnecessary "analysis" make the paper, but Storm somehow neglected to mention that Rick Santorum, one of the unhelpful pundits he cites as contributing to the mindless babble, is on the Inky's payroll. Hell, he should also have thrown Michael Smerconish, who pops up with frequency on MSNBC, under the bus while he was at it. S|C

Smith Fired; Exclamation Points Relieved

Stephen A. Finally Gets the Boot, Saving Countless Readers from Horrible Prose and Awful Reporting

LAST SUMMER, when Inquirer editor Bill Marimow conducted a mercy killing of Stephen A. Smith's column and busted him down to reporter -- though he was also underqualified for that gig, as well -- you knew it was only a matter of time before Smith and the paper would part company. Stephen A.'s byline had not been seen since then, though he didn't exactly go into hiding. No, in addition to analyzing the NBA for ESPN, he ended up landing the perfect job for a guy with no more knowledge than the schmo sitting at the end of the bar and the communications skills to match: talk radio. The Inky finally cashiered him the other day, as Dan Gross reported, for, of all things, "job abandonment." Apparently not showing up for work for five months is cause for termination. Who knew?

Philadelphia | What Sucks

The Local Newspaper Scene: All the Wire Service Copy That's Fit to Print

Dull headlines. Bland wire service copy. Tired, uninspiring commentary. Virtually no young voices. Sponsors'  logos splashed all over what are supposed to be news pages. Smaller news holes.

The return of local, private ownership to the Philadelphia Inquirer and Daily News was supposed to result in better newspapers. Divorced from the need to meet quarterly earnings expectations, the papers were going to refocus their efforts on the region, giving readers unparalleled insights into the places where we live and work. Instead, we've gotten the sad litany of traits listed above. The decline is breathtaking. The papers have the feel and tone of provincial, small-town rags. And I know that their newsrooms are separate, but by sharing advertising and production staffs, the Inky and DN aren't competing with each other as fully as they ought. The only area of improvement has been in the papers' Web site, and that's only because there was nowhere to go but up. There's a nice selection of multimedia content and blogs, and one can even find updated news stories posted as they're written, a terrific step up from the prior static site. I'd still like to see more news and fewer ads, though.

As for competition, there is none locally. The Bulletin is a joke; City Paper and the Philadelphia Weekly provide important alternative viewpoints and different angles, but as weeklies they lack the resources for comprehensive coverage, and they operate too often with a distracting chip on their shoulders.

If Boston can produce a worthy paper in the Globe day in and day out -- all while operating as a division of a public company, no less -- Philadelphia ought to be able to as well. Now that would be news.

"Philadelphia | What Sucks," an essay about people, places, and things in the region worthy of scorn, will appear each Wedneday in Shallow Center. S|C

The Clumsy Ax

KYW Botches Its Firing of Embattled Anchorhottie Alycia Lane

THE FAILURE of media companies to conduct even adequate media relations continues to astound. Channel 3 let the Alycia Lane fiasco fester for nearly a month before cashiering her, and since its stated reason was not her arrest last month for allegedly punching cop but "the overall impact of a series of incidents resulting from judgments she has made," it would seem that the station was considering a pink slip for quite a while. If that's the case, it should have dumped her immediately after the New York incident. The result would have been the same -- a wrongful termination lawsuit filed by Lane -- but at least KYW could have avoided a very embarrassing three weeks.

And, Jesus, who made the call to fire her on Monday afternoon instead of late Friday? Did they learn nothing in J-school?

Oh, right. They're not actually journalists. My bad. S|C

Inquirer Headline of the Day

A Mail-It-In Column Inspires Thoughts of a New Blog Feature

I KNOW things have been a little, ah, sparse around here, and I do intend to rectify that soon. Meantime, I couldn't let today go without a note about Karen Heller's Alycia Lane piece in today's Inquirer, whose headline was, I kid you not, "In local TV, sadly, looks are everything."

Make sure you buy next week's Inky, so that you can read:

• "Among government workers, regrettably, effort is lacking"
• "At Shore points, unfortunately, sunburn abounds"
• "In baseball, lamentably, players scratch themselves" 

Picking on the Inquirer is rather a heartless sport, but I've noticed lately that the paper's headline writing has been pretty damn week. Wonder if I could find a new turkey each day ... S|C

So They Say | Special Daily Edition

Also, This Just In: Physicians Don't See a Lot of Healthy Patients

From today's front-pager in the Inquirer about the declining number of marriages reaching 25 years:

"Twenty-five years is a good marriage now," said Lynne Z. Gold-Bikin, a prominent Philadelphia divorce lawyer for more than three decades. "In all honesty, I don't see a lot of good marriages."

I'm sure the fact that Ms. Gold-Bikin is a divorce lawyer has nothing to do with her failure to encounter many happy marriages.

Airing of Grievances

AS A television columnist at the Inquirer, Gail Shister landed interviews that no one else could, she broke stories, and her stuff was picked up by newspapers across the country. She gave the Inky its sole truly national presence. Naturally, the paper's new management saw this as a negative, saying Shister's beat was too focused on broadcast news as they were bumping her down to features writer. Apparently seeking even worse ways to shoot themselves in the foot, Shister's editors have gone further, reassigning her to the metro desk and greatly reducing the chances that the words "as first reported by the Philadelphia Inquirer" will ever appear in print again. Meanwhile, Shister's colleague, Jonathan Storm, is permitted to file this kind of whiny dreck, from this summer's Television Critics Association meeting in Beverly Hills:

Most critics love using TV terms in a semi-annual, nearly three-week gathering that is as much like summer camp as anything in real life, but not because it's fun. The grueling schedule can wear down the most energetic writer, but what's known as the Press Tour can be rewarding for the way it allows people with the same consuming interest (many of whom are good friends) to gather from scattered parts of North America.

Dude gets paid to watch TV and all he can do is complain about being flown to California to talk with actors and producers. Jonny, brother, it could be worse: You could be writing about house fires in Kensington.

Maybe We Could Also Catch a Nordiques Game While We're There

LAST YEAR, for reasons still unknown, the Shallow Center household began receiving Health magazine in the mail. We never subscribed to it and never responded to the periodic subscription renewal requests we received, yet once a month it shows up on our doorstep. Health is clearly a female-oriented pub, yet I still like paging through it, because things such as maintaining work-life balance, managing stress, and eating healthy really aren't confined to one gender, and because there's usually an off-the-charts attractive model smiling on each issue's cover. (This month's, seen at right, is uber-cutie Kara Thomas.)

As the father of daughters and a pretty live-and-let-live kind of guy, I'm not at all bothered by Health's female bent, and when a travel-story sidebar headlined "Book this: 4 foolproof getaways" mentioned Montreal, where Mrs. SC and I will be headed this fall, I dove right in. My eagerness was halted abruptly, though, by this sentence:

Catch a Montreal Expos game and the jazz festival (www.montrealjazzfest.com).

Sacre bleu! The Expos moved out of Montreal for Washington after the 2004 season. My wife thinks it's sexist, but maybe a bit of a male viewpoints might have helped the pub's editors avoid such an obvious error. I look forward to reading the correction next month. Assuming, of course, we're still receiving it then. Um, our check is in the mail ... along with our order for Philadelphia A's season tickets.

Way to Go, Guys

 BY SUSPENDING Don Imus for two weeks, CBS and NBC have sent a clear message.

That message is: Racism is fine as long as no one complains about it.

Imus's Klan-like screed about Rutgers's women's basketball team, broadcast nationally last week, would have gotten a lesser-rated jock an immediate pink slip. Imus, though, draws listeners and viewers, and so it was only well after the public condemnation rolled in that his bosses acted. In waiting so long, they gave the impression that they are concerned not that their employee polluted the airwaves with racist drivel, but that that they might lose revenue because of it.

Which makes CBS and NBC as culpable as Imus, especially considering that this isn't the first time that his on-air commentary crossed the line that separates offensive from unacceptable.

Welcome to the Philadelphia InquirerNewsWeekly

ON THE heels of Michael Klein's revelation that Philadelphia Weekly is for sale comes today's scoop by Dan Gross that Philadelphia Media Holdings, owner of the Inquirer and Daily News, is reportedly a bidder. Everyone involved is no-commenting, which may be a sign that something is indeed up. It's bad enough that the city's two significant dailies are owned by the same company; throwing in an alternative weekly that does a fair amount of original reporting and, along with City Paper, provides much-needed differing viewpoints doesn't bode well of the quality of Philadelphia journalism and commentary. Didn't the city just get rid of corporate newspapering when Knight-Ridder took its ball and bat and went home?