But how about another kind of news? 'Missing' news. No, not about unreported stories, but about stories that have been reported but not printed. Censorship? Good heavens no. Something wrong with the presses.
My current demographic definition puts me squarely in the 'old man' bracket. I once read that advertising executives would claim that you can't sell anything to anyone over 50 through an ad. I don't really know if my purchases from the time of my crossing the 50-year yard line were influenced directly by advertising, but my credit card statements indicate that I have been buying things. (And paying for them.)
But back to 'missing news.' I get very reliable home delivery of the NYT and the WSJ. I have probably been reading the print edition of the Times every day since The Herald Tribune went out of business. My favorite paper. Still. News, sports, editorial cartoons, and comics, with Our Miss Peach. You can look it up when The Tribune crashed after the famous 1963 newspaper strike.
Thus, it's a long time. My wife teases me about my reading the Times. She will at least once a week utter her long deceased father's opinion of the paper; "that pinko, commie rag." Patrick Brennan was an IRT motorman on the Woodlawn Line and proud member of the union, and considered Mike Quill a deity. But he didn't like the Times, and his emphatic opinion of the paper is not the only one I've ever heard over the years. He immigrated from County Sligo, Ireland, and loved the United States. He laughed at the Irish back on the Isle, but the Times was always "a pinko commie rag."
It is no use continually telling my wife that I can read the paper, but not agree with the paper. I never read the editorials, but I know where their hearts lie. I don't care. For my now discounted print price I get a good overview of the world, including sports, while usually not agreeing with anything they're leaning towards. It is thoroughly possible to do this. I've been doing it for decades. Maybe you can call it 'objective reading,' I don't know. I don't care.
All this a long preamble to telling anyone who cares to read this that I'm' quite familiar with the paper and its layout. So imagine my surprise yesterday when I turned the pages, got to the last page of the first section and saw that the Op-Ed page, page 23, was opposite a story about Joe Piscopo wanting to run for Governor of New Jersey.
Where is the Editorial Page that I ignore? A story about Joe Piscopo with a picture of the comedian at a restaurant with wine and food in front of him is not the lead editorial. (Maybe the next day, without the picture.)
It was then I realized that page 22 is missing. Missing news. And if the sheet of paper that contains page 22 is missing, I'm also missing three more pages from the broadsheet: pages 21, 3 and 4. I'm missing news. And no one on any news show is talking about this. 'All the news that's fit to print' didn't all get printed. Alert the media. I did.
I wrote to the Public Editor and told them of the missing pages. The subject of my email was 'Collating Mishap.' Maybe it will be the title of a mystery book someday. I know the Public Editor is really what I once heard the first Public Editor, Daniel Okrent, describe as the 'Complaint Department.'
I explained I wasn't going to report a missing delivery, because the reliable people who deliver the paper would probably only bring me another paper that also had the pages missing. I've actually got a rare stamp. The newspaper equivalent of the inverted Jenny airmail stamp of 1918. An edition of the paper with a missing sheet. E Bay? I'm definitely saving it.
Today's Correction section does not acknowledge that there were editions that had missing pages. Missing news. I'm not going to appear on a talk show as a talking head to discuss the missing news. Charles Krauthammer and Matt Lauer are not calling.
I know the Public Editor does not respond to the emails they get. But perhaps there are alert readers out there who received similar editions with the missing pages?
Missing news. You heard it here first.
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