The Worst Newspapers in America
The first in a series.
Please send me your nominations for local papers that deserve this award.

The Desert Post Weekly

According to the Columbia Journalism Review, the Worst Newspaper in America is The Daily Oklahoman, and they rip it a new one. "Where else can you find a big-city editorial page - run by a Christian Coalition devotee plucked from Washington, D.C.'s right-wing Free Congress Foundation - that not only demonizes unions, environmentalists, feminists, Planned Parenthood, and public education, but also seems obsessed with lecturing gays?" Good question. The answer? How about "all over the place."

I might disagree with everything The Daily Oklahoman has to say, but at least they HAVE something to say, and as wrongheaded as they are, they say it with passion and conviction.

Any journalism with passion and conviction isn't all bad. Writing from the heart is always better than writing without any heart.

To me, the worst journalism of all is lazy, passionless, self-serving drivel, journalism that has NOTHING to say and keeps saying it, journalism that ignores the grand opportunity to actually say something meaningful in favor of endless filler. It's been said that people should think globally but act locally, which means the worst newspapers are those that not only don't think globally, they don't think at all.

By those standards, my local weekly paper, the Desert Post Weekly, serving Palm Springs and the Coachella Valley, is one of the worst newspapers in America.

For one thing, it poses as an "alternative" to the local daily, the Desert Sun, when it's actually owned by the Desert Sun, and fully half of its content is reprinted from the Desert Sun. This is deceptive and despicable, convincing out-of-towners they're getting some sort of underground scoop when they're getting the same old same old.

The paper is edited by Brian Medricka, who used to do listings at the Desert Sun. Employees of the paper have let me know anonymously that they feel the pain of working for a man who doesn't realize what a pathetic joke he is. Nothing is worse than someone who thinks he's funny but actually has no sense of humor whatsoever. Medricka loves gay sexual innuendo. It pisses off his workers at their staff meetings but they say nothing, so us hapless readers are left with cover stories like "You Can Get Naked" (about nude spas), "Lick This" (hard-hitting investigative journalism about how many different flavors of ice cream there are), and "The White Stuff" (about, no not that, snow). In the ice cream issue, Medricka devoted an ENTIRE PAGE to pictures of the staff answering the "burning question" of what flavor ice cream they would be. I nominate it as the most embarrassing moment in publishing history. What kind of ice cream is Brian Medricka?

Brian Medricka is a moron. He's not even TRYING to be excellent. He's striving for mediocrity and succeeding enormously. You will never read a newspaper as lightweight as this. It's completely shameful that a city as sophisticated as Palm Springs has such a frivolous and irrelevant local "alternative" newspaper. They're not printing articles the Desert Sun wouldn't print because they're controversial or "alternative," they're printing articles the Desert Sun wouldn't print because they're inane. They put cute pictures of the staff on the front page, finally rising to the level of precocious high school yearbook. Their attempts at humor are just annoying and complete failures. The elevation of the ubiquitous "News of the Weird" to feature status completes the celebration of the trivial. Their way of dealing with controversial or important subjects ignored by the mainstream media is to ignore them too. If something important is happening, they're sure to avoid it. At a time when it seems that C students are running the country, I guess it's not surprising they've sunk so low, but there was a time when the paper was actually worth reading, way back when Mona DeCrinis was the editor. At least she had a brain.

Kevin Necessary (Ice cream flavor, "an offshoot of Chunky Monkey - Angry Monkey") is the paper's editorial cartoonist despite the fact he has never displayed the slightest iota of talent for editorial cartooning. None whatsoever. Every issue he begs the readers to send in ideas but none have materialized. If Trudeau ever asked his readers to submit ideas, he'd be inundated. Why hasn't Necessary been inundated with ideas from readers? Because nobody wants to be associated with his incredibly inane drawings.

I gave them a story. In Desert Hot Springs there's a housing project called "Mountain View" in which the hundreds of houses are packed together so tightly that not one of them has a view of the mountains. That's right, one of the only advantages of living in DHS is the spectacular view of Mount San Jacinto - and nobody in "Mountain View" can see it. But Medricka wouldn't want to offend any money grubbing real estate developers by exposing their callousness, would he?

His response. To ban my e-mail address.His response to negative letters to the editor? He asked me to stop "harassing his staff," despite the fact that none of them complained, and banned yet another Hotmail address. Hey Brian. I can keep making up Hotmail addresses forever.

It is, of course, a sign of insecurity to be unable to withstand criticism, which is the real reason he won't print my letters. Hell, if Pamela Anderson can take being "roasted," Brian should be able to take the heat. She's got more balls than he does. Brian's dick is so small that when he gets blown by old men, they have to put their teeth back in for him to feel anything. How's that for "harassing his staff?"

As proof of Medricka's total lack of humor is his certain reaction to this posting, which will most definitely be humorless. He will be indignant, angry, and filled with outrage. As he reads this very sentence, he is preparing to throw a hissy fit. He will try to contact the webmaster and DEMAND the page be taken down, and his capillaries will burst as he discovers there's nothing he can do about the fact that this page will remain on the internet forever. Everyone on earth now has access to the fact he's a moron.

This might seem like overkill towards a paper that never strives to be anything more than innocuous, but that's the point. There are plenty of papers I strenuously disagree with, but nobody has ever disagreed with anything said in the Desert Post Weekly because the Desert Post Weekly never says anything. The only firm conviction editor Brian Medricka ever shows is to keep his head firmly planted between the butt cheeks of his corporate bosses.

Don't take my word for it. Next time you're in Palm Springs, pick one up. After reading it, you'll be calling Stephen Hawking and asking if he can help get your time back.
 

"Civil disobedience is not our problem. Our problem is civil obedience. Our problem is that numbers of people all over the world have obeyed the dictates of the leaders of their government and have gone to war, and millions have been killed because of this obedience... Our problem is that people are obedient all over the world in the face of poverty and starvation and stupidity, and war, and cruelty. Our problem is that people are obedient while the jails are full of petty thieves, and all the while the grand thieves are running and robbing the country. That's our problem."
- Howard Zinn -
 
"Our real enemies are the people who make us feel so good that we are slowly, but inexorably, pulled down into the quicksand of smugness and self-satisfaction."
- Sydney Harris -
 
"Mourn not the dead that in the cool earth lie, but rather mourn the apathetic throng, the coward, and the meek who see the world's great anguish and its wrong, and dare not speak."
- Ralph Chaplin -
 
"People have not been horrified by war to a sufficient extent... War will exist until that distant day when the conscientious objector enjoys the same reputation and prestige as the warrior does today."
- John Fitzgerald Kennedy -
 
"Journalism is the only profession explicitly protected by the U.S. Constitution, because journalists are supposed to be the check and balance on government. We're supposed to be holding those in power accountable. We're not supposed to be their megaphone. That's what the corporate media have become."
- Amy Goodman -
 
"32% of local reporters have acknowledged that they have softened the tone of a news story on behalf of the interests of their news organization. 73% of journalists believe that buyouts of news organizations by big, diversified corporations has a negative effect on journalism. 26% of local journalists say they have been told to ignore a story because it was dull or complicated, but suspect the real motivation to be potential harm to the company's financial interests."
- Self-Censorship: How Often and Why, Journalists Avoiding the News: The Pew Research Center for the People and the Press -
 
"The man who reads nothing at all is better educated than the man who reads nothing but newspapers."
- Thomas Jefferson -
 
"The public have an insatiable curiosity to know everything. Except what is worth knowing. Journalism, conscious of this, and having tradesman-like habits, supplies their demands."
- Oscar Wilde -
 
    "Media scholar Robert McChesney, professor of communication at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, writes that the purpose of journalism is to perform three tasks: to monitor the powerful, to winnow the truth from the lies, and to present a range of informed positions on important issues. But the journalism produced by media conglomerates does the opposite. The junk news they broadcast is intended to protect the wealthy and idiotize the masses while trivializing crucially important issues...
    "The people who run these companies and decide what we need to know are some of the wealthiest men on earth. As CEOs of enormous businesses, their job is to sell a journalism that is the cheapest to produce, appeals to the largest market, and brings in the most profit. These values are not compatible with good journalism. Instead of thoughtful reports on global warming or the link between military spending and the national deficit, the news they give us is dominated by Michael Jackson or whoever the freak du jour happens to be."
- Rod Helle: Are you an idiot? -
 
"Do not fear the enemy, for your enemy can only take your life. It is far better that you fear the media, for they will steal your Honor. That awful power, the public opinion of a nation, is created in America by a horde of ignorant, self-complacent simpletons who failed at ditching and shoemaking and fetched up in journalism on their way to the poorhouse."
- Mark Twain -
 
"The tradition of journalism is being eroded. And in its place we have impressions, images, archetypes, icons, celebrities and the like. This is how public opinion is now being massaged and manipulated. The war was a testing ground, not only for new weapons systems and techniques, but also for new communications strategies."
- Danny Schechter: Weapons of Mass Deception Filmmaker Declares War on the War Propaganda Machine -
 
"No matter what a young person thinks he or she is really hot stuff at doing, he or she is sooner or later going to run into somebody in the same field who will cut him or her a new asshole, so to speak."
- Kurt Vonnegut Jr. -