Friday, September 21, 2007

Small town news chatter

Here's what you get in your newspaper when you live in a small town...Perfect reading score.
This story, like one I mentioned last week is from The Daily Record in Wooster, Ohio. I'm sure subjects like this make many small town newspapers. Apparently this boy got a perfect score on the reading section of the Ohio Achievement Test.
Call me somewhat biased, here. This kid is from Triway, which is Orrville's (my hometown) biggest rival, so I already don't like him. To make it WORSE, not to brag or anything, but I got a perfect score on the reading proficiency test TWICE. Not once, twice, and I never made the paper.
But here's the rub. Triway isn't really a town, it's a section of Wooster and a lot of the people who work for The Daily Record live in "Triway." Triway tends to get a lot more coverage in the paper for that reason because so many of The Daily Record's employees are biased and show that in the paper.
My senior year in high school, my cheerleading squad took first place (over Triway, by the way) at our big local competition, but whose picture was on the front of the sports page? Triway's! There was a picture of the Triway cheerleaders with a headline that read, "Orrville cheerleaders sweep competition!" Now, tell me how that makes sense.
It did later when someone informed us that the guy in charge of that section was from Triway.
To make my point here, The Daily Record has a huge tendency to show bias and I know that tends to happen, but it's annoying. This goes hand in hand with my ethics lesson this week which was about truth and objectivity. The Daily Record doesn't pay much attention to objectivity.

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