Pilot Redux | Feb 8, 2010

Editor’s Note: Pilot Redux is a new feature in which every day a member of the AltDaily team reads The Pilot and gives you links to–and their take on–that day’s most interesting news.

Editorial: Don’t wait to repeal don’t ask, don’t tell

Hi Big Brother.

This one was from a few days ago, but it bears repeating, given The Pilot‘s conservative reputation. The piece opens, “Sooner or later, a generational shift in attitudes will bring an end to the ban against gays, lesbians and bisexuals serving openly in the military. But, for the sake of national security and civil rights, the Pentagon and Congress should make the change sooner.”

Our take: The biggest paper in a Southern military town calling a gay issue a ‘civil rights’ issue is brave, clear-minded, and should be applauded.

Icy weather deteriorating roads, carving out potholes

Apparently potholes don’t come from the pothole stork, like I always thought, but from expanding water in the pavement freezing, expanding, and then deteriorating the integrity of the pavement as it thaws. Good, explanatory reporting from Debbie Messina. More useful was this advice she pulled from Firestone Complete Auto Care: “Avoid braking during impact with a pothole. Instead, brake before impact and release the brake before contact. Less severe damage occurs when a tire is rolling, rather than skidding, over the pothole because there is no ‘solid hit’ against the edge of the hole.”

Theft leaves opening of dog park in limbo

Sometimes criminals can be real mutts, eh? According to reporter Cindy Clayton, “Two men stole rolled-up fencing worth an estimated $3,000 that was needed to complete a new neighborhood dog park” located on the 2700 block of Tait Terrace. I love quotes like this: “It’s just really a shame that people would steal from dogs in the neighborhood,” (a park organizer) said. “It’s very sad.” Makes me feel like I live in a small town, and I like that.

Pilot homebase.

Electives denied to failing Beach students

Interesting story by Lauren Roth about how, “At Brandon Middle School, students know what happens if they don’t study or do their homework: They get pulled out of their favorite elective to catch up.” Apparently the program has been successful, as “After the first year, the number of middle school students retaking classes over the summer dropped 40 percent to 673 students while the number of students taking free remedial classes to prepare them for the next grade increased.”

There’s a couple things Roth missed that I would have liked to know: The more specific terms under which a student is forced out of his or her electives, and what the electives are at Brandon Middle School. I’m assuming a lot of the electives are in the arts, journalism, and other such less academically respected pursuits. It’s good the program works but, under the surface, it’s still a sad commentary on the perceived value of non ‘core’ classes.

Virginia Beach cuts back on program for pregnant teens

One reason I prefer to read The Pilot‘s print edition rather than online is it saves me from the commenters. There is what seems to be a small army of people with lots of time, hate, and–most dangerous–plentiful access to the Internets that love to say nonsense under articles like this. “I’m tired of my tax dollars paying for someone else’s mistake,” said a commenter called christopherc738. My wish for the day is that when chrisopherc738 dies he is reincarnated as a pregnant teen. Like, he is a pregnant teen from birth. As a baby. And we’ll see how he feels then.

City Employee Salaries

This feature is always on The Pilot‘s site, but I wanted to give it a shout out. It’s useful for making your heckling of failing city officers more specific. It’s also great for making you feel sad about the money you make as an independent journalist or adjunct instructor at ODU, if you happen to do those kinds of things.

Read the paper! It’s good for you.

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Tags:little brother keeping an eye on big brother, Virginian-Pilot

• BC | February 8, 10 @ 9:12 am

  Nice job, Jesse. Hopefully this series will help publicize two essential but often overlooked facts: 1) Daily newspapers are filled with tons of interesting and important information that people should read every day, and 2) Newspapers need to be read critically. Think about what you are reading. Question the premises, examine the biases, dig into the findings and compare the information in the article to what you may already know.

  I still think this should be called “If you had read the paper…” and ought to be expanded to include The Daily Press and other local papers.

  
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• Jim Roberts | February 8, 10 @ 9:34 am

  “The Pilot’s conservative reputation.”

  Huh?

  
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  • Jesse Scaccia | February 8, 10 @ 9:52 am

    No?

    
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    • Jim Roberts | February 8, 10 @ 10:25 am

      Not even close!

      The Pilot reports on the military (as it should) and publishes some conservative columnists (for balance; again, as it should), but I would never even be tempted to say the paper has a conservative reputation.

      If you read the letters to the editor, you could say the readership is conservative, but the paper itself certainly isn’t.

      Don’t take my word for it, though. What do others think?

      
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• Mike D'Orso | February 9, 10 @ 5:35 pm

  Jim Roberts is spot-on in his concise observation(s).

  As a former writer for the Virginian-Pilot, I can tell you the publishers are certainly conservative, as are a large number of the readership(although I would hesitate/hate to say they are a majority). Never mind the newspaper’s Letters section — we all know how such forums can easiily be hijacked by an undersized but loud and rabid minority such as, say, Tea Partyers. All public forums — including this “Comments” section itself — are liable to such appropriation. That’s one price of a democracy. So be it.

  In any event, I can attest to the fact that the vast majority of the Pilot’s editorial staff (the writers, photographers, graphic artists, and broad spectrum of editors who produce the stories published in the Pilot each day — not to be confused with the staff of the editorial PAGE) are first and foremost, regardless of whether, in their private lives they are liberal, conservative, libertarian, vegan, Hindu, or heavy-metal, are, when they begin each working day, highly-trained and highly-skilled PROFESSIONALS who have demonstrated a level of critical thinking, analysis, objectivity, insight, and reasoned, objective, open-minded, dogged PERSISTENCE that has enabled them to rise this far in an extremely competitive and demanding field.

  And I mean “far.” Nobody comes straight out of journalism school to a spot on the staff of a newswpaper such as this one. The Virginian-Pilot is not unlike a AAA baseball team….the last rung on a long, rugged ladder that leads to the majors (the “majors,” here, being the pinnacle for every journalist — the truly “big-city” newspapers to which countless Pilot (and Ledger-Star, for you old-timers out there) staffers have been “called up” over the years: the Washington Post, the New York Times, the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Chicago Tribune, the L.A. Times, the Miami Herald, the Boston Globe, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, and others).

  It’s no small achievement to be hired as a Virginian-Pilot staff writer, editor, photographer, or graphic artist, and the readership in this region needs to remind itself of what they would have without this newspaper. It is precisley institutions like the Virginian Pilot that represent the last bastion against the increasingly well-funded and well-organized legions of rabid zealots at both ends of the political spectrum, all with an agenda, none of whom has any interest in any “facts” besides those that support their case, and all of whom are willing and eager to manipulate and manufacture such “facts,” if need be, to further their cause, whose aim is to supplant or at least to control the institutions we currently call “the media.”

  This fight over “facts,” over information, and over control of its flow, has become the front-line battleground in the culture war that currently envelops our nation. We need to thank our lucky stars that we have a local newspaper the quality of the Virginian-Pilot to turn to for reliable reporting in this age of vitriol, rumors, and outright lies that go viral each day on this wonderful-but-easily-exploited tool we call the Internet.

  For all its faults — and every profession has them — we are fortunate, in this age of dying daily newspapers to still have one of the caliber and quality of the Pilot.

  I shudder to think of what this Hampton Roads region would be like without it.

  
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  • Jesse Scaccia | February 9, 10 @ 7:52 pm

    Fantastic and insightful comment, Mike. Thank you. I, for one, fully agree on the importance of the Pilot to our community.

    As for the Pilot’s conservative reputation, whether earned or not, I do think that this is how the majority of people view it. I don’t necessarily agree; I was just stating this as a matter of course. That phrase was not meant as a commentary.

    
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• Earl Swift | February 9, 10 @ 9:28 pm

  Jesse,
  I have to take issue with your insistence that “the majority of people” see The Pilot as conservative. If anything, I think most folks in the paper’s circulation area would judge it left-leaning, and I think they’d complain that it has become more so with the passage of time.

  I don’t truck with that complaint, but God knows I heard it enough over the 22 years I worked there.

  Virginia has plenty of conservative papers, the Times-Dispatch and Washington Times being the most obvious examples; next to those guys, our paper is downright Bolshevik, in both fact and public image. Then again, by Massachusetts standards, The Pilot would seem pretty milquetoast.

  I’d characterize its reputation as cautiously liberal. Every once in a while, an editorial packs a surprise, but in every case I can remember over the past five years, the nature of the surprise has been the boldness of the paper’s liberalism. In no case has it been because the paper went the other way.

  Bear in mind that I’m speaking of the paper’s editorial positions, its known stances on the issues. The politics of its newsroom’s individual members would be mighty difficult for readers to discern, because they rarely find a voice in print. The politics of the paper’s ownership is, much to its credit, likewise hard to make out from reading the product.

  Cheers,
  Earl Swift

  
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  • Jesse Scaccia | February 9, 10 @ 9:34 pm

    Hi Earl,

    It is certainly possible that in my time here I’ve happened to interact with a pool of people with an unfair or skewed view of the Pilot. There are others–Jim, Mike, and yourself among them–who it seems would have a better handle of the overall sentiment re: the Pilot’s political leaning. This comment thread has been very informative. Thank you, sincerely.

    
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