Tabloidism vs journalism

"Nothing in all the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity." -Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.


The Post-Star is on a crusade to (hold hand over heart) protect the taxpayers. Nothing else matters in local quality of life except (hold hand over heart) protecting the taxpayers. And the paper gets annoyed to no end when locals think of themselves as citizens or parents first rather than only caring about their wallet.

Their most recent whipping boy is the Glens Falls school district's (GFSD) board of education and teachers' union for approving a new contract which gave the teachers 4 percent annual raises but forced them to contribute more to (always skyrocketing cost of) their health insurance.

The monopoly paper has two objections.

The first criticism is that the board and union refused to release details of the contract until AFTER it was approved. This made it impossible for the public to comment on it.

Many local school districts have followed this same, wrongheaded route. They claim they want the public's input but deny the public the information they'd need to formulate any input one way or the other. It's one thing to not publicize every crossed t and dotted i of the negotiations. But once a tentative agreement has been approved by the union and makes it to the board's agenda, it must be made public well-enough in advance for the public to scrutinize it if they so choose.

Teacher salaries make up a huge chunk (I want to say around 70 percent, but don't quote me) of the typical school district's budget. A budget which is funded in large part by local property taxes. The public ought to be given a chance to comment on that contract before it becomes written in stone.

As the last eight years have shown, secrecy is the enemy of democracy and good government.

On this, The Post-Star is spot on.

But the second objection is more interesting. After bungling numerical analysis in the original article, they ran a corrected piece claiming that the new pact would add up to an extra $1.4 million to the local tax burden.

'$1.4 MILLION' screamed the headline!!!

But a little math puts it in a different context.

There are about 14,000 residents of the city. This number isn't perfect because it includes residents of the Abraham Wing district on the city's east side but excludes residents of the GFSD who live in the town of Queensbury. But this is a good approximation of the number of residents in the GFSD.

$1.4 million divided by 14,000 works out to an increase of $100 per resident divided by the four year length of the contract works out to an extra $25 per GF (at most) resident per year or a little more than $2 a month. So for a household of four, it would work out to around $2 extra per week... or the cost of one Sunday Post-Star (maybe that's why the daily is so worried!).

Then again, $1.4 MILLION (OMG!!@#!) makes for a more dramatic headline than $2/person/month.

But what really gets The Post-Star's goat is that people are not as outraged as the paper's ivory tower editors think they should be.

They continue to bang the drum to whip up outrage that isn't there. In addition to two articles on the topic (one bungled and one apparently correct), they've published an indignant editorial (Update: now two indignant editorials), an indignant opinion column by the always-pompous Managing Editor Ken Tingley and several blog entries (alternatively indignant and defensive) by Tingley.

The tone of all these pieces is that we should be outraged because the eminent newspaper told us to be so. And if we're not, it means either that we're rubes or that we're secretly in league with the leeches in the teachers' union.

There is a reasonable debate to be had on this issue, but the arrogant tone of The Post-Star's brain trust prevents this from happening. They insist on perpetuating the simplistic dichotomy that the only way to alleviate the overwhelming tax burden on local property owners is to target teacher salaries. It's either well-paid teachers and overtaxed residents or underpaid teachers and slightly less overtaxed residents.

A more reasonable debate would ask whether the fundamental structure of education funding in New York state is broken. It would ask why so much of the mandatory education programs is funded locally when the crushing majority of mandates for those programs come from state and federal authorities.

But such a debate requires more nuanced discussion, less scapegoat and faux indignant outrage, fewer tabloid headlines and less reporting driven by editorial positions.


Update: And as some commenters to the paper's website have pointed out, their $1.4 MILLION (!!!!) figure is a maximum. According to the daily's own reporting, the figure assumes that no higher-paid experienced teachers will retire or leave the district to be replaced by lower-paid, less experienced teachers. Given the near impossibility that no teacher will leave the district in the next four years, the $1.4 million ($2/week/family of four) figure will almost certainly be lower.