Last week in an unsigned editorial, the Daily Press made the ballsy claim Virginians would be healthier if we exercised more and ate less fast food.

This was in response to a fat report. The column made no mention of our large military population, a sector that should make us healthier compared to other states. The column failed to wonder what the study might indicate about the health of our brave service personnel. It failed to opine whether this is evidence our military laxes its physical standards during times of war, something that may become a new reality. The column made no mention of the running culture in northern Virginia or the hiking culture in Charlottesville, population sectors that should make us more fit by comparison. Most disheartening, the column made no attempt to explain. Anything.

Just because it looks kinda like a meal--or a column--doesn't make it one. (Pic | dietsinreview.com)

Following the advice of eighth-grade English teachers everywhere, the column asked a lot of questions: “What could we in Virginia be doing wrong? Could we be eating too much food, too much of it fried, with a side of potatoes? The latter have become the bête noir of obesity, blamed for all our unhealthy poundage. It couldn’t have anything to do with processing the tubers with salt and fat into hard-to-resist finger foods, such as chips and fries, could it?” Each question is more obvious than the next, more perfunctory, more boorish. The answers do not supply any information beyond what is found in studies done by Ancel Keys in the 70s.

Grand insights are as rare as grand compromises, but if the editors of the Daily Press ever pull themselves away from their spreadsheets and meetings, they will discover the reason for their dwindling circulation: they don’t think. Ever since Addison and Steele invented the form, the goal of the column has been to offer insight, novel information, or at the very least some kind of argument. While a lot of opinion pieces written today are full of partisan hate, there are columnists at the L.A. Times, the Chicago Tribune (the parent company of the Daily Press), the Omaha World-Herald, and countless alt weeklies, glossy monthlies, and seventy-copy chapbooks who deliver thought-provoking commentary at a steady clip.

A column cannot be a simple presentation of basic information. The columnist’s job isn’t to copy and paste. Her job is to jolt the reader out of banal thoughts and to reveal hidden truths, uncanny perspectives, and historical connections. The columnist’s job is the same as the poet’s.  “If my poetry aims to achieve anything, it’s to deliver people from the limited ways in which they see and feel.” – Jim Morrison  This column wouldn’t earn a “C” if it were submitted to my freshman English class at Thomas Nelson.

It reminded me of an essay a student wrote a few years back in which he made the brazen claim drug abuse damages families. It reminded me of a Ke$ha song: not only sub-text free, but content-free. The editors threw a bone to their conservative readers, and called it a day: “Really, we all know the solution. We don’t need the government to tell us.”

DPK criticizes the DP because he believes in its greater potential.

Virginians are fat because we are arrogant. Our egos are so wide we view anyone with new information as a threat to our manhood. Because we see our doctors as white-coated elitists, we reject information vital to healthy sexual activity. Which is yet another layer to this serious problem the Daily Press column failed to mention: Virginians are fat because parents fail to realize they are their children’s primary teacher. The act of learning requires us to drop our arrogant front and admit someone knows something we don’t. A quick look at the word “understand” demonstrates my point. Reading requires physical and intellectual submission. You lay or sit and submit yourself to the author’s authority.

I can’t blame readers on the Peninsula for not submitting to the authority of the Daily Press. My father, who read the Chicago Tribune and Sun Times every morning before work when I was a kid, calls it “the five-minute gazette.” This April DP editorial with the heady headline “Working together Instead of duplicating cost and functions, localities should find ways to share” suggests (yet again) that five minutes may be all they spend on the paper themselves. Let’s all work together to eliminate government waste sounds like a sound-bite that slogan-generating software would create if you told it to appeal to conservatives and liberals alike. The column begins with a question, which it follows with a non-answer: “Does it make sense that a librarian in Newport News is scanning the latest ‘must reads’ and deciding what to order, while another in Hampton is doing the same thing, and so is one in York County and another in Williamsburg? Of course not.” Total library operating costs are .5 percent of Hampton’s budget. That’s orders of magnitude smaller than spending on virtually everything else. Talk about a sacred cow.

The Peninsula needs an intellectually rigorous newspaper. Say a serial killer begins abducting children in Newport News. If all our newspaper can write is “This thing happened” then we are in real danger. But if we have writers who can think up possible theories of and motivations for these crimes, there is a strong possibility our community could put a stop to them. In professional development classes at Thomas Nelson and countless meetings during my former tenure at the University of Phoenix, I came across study after study that proved adult learners need to know why. We need context to understand. We need theories to understand. We don’t need the government to tell us what to do, but we do need journalists to inform us why we should or shouldn’t do something, then we can decide for ourselves.

Given just facts, we do not make sound decisions, or as the Talking Heads sang “Facts are simple, and facts are straight. Facts are lazy and facts are late… Facts are nothing on the face of things.”