The local newspapers just ran a story that NASA has just found an amino acid in material collected from a comet in 2004. The stories all soberly state that this is the best evidence yet that life could possibly develop in places other than Earth.

Uhh…

These same newspapers get all hysterical whenever a drunk farmer thinks he sees a flying saucer steal one of his cows, or when distant lights in the night sky can’t be anything but alien spacecraft, or when another poor soul is hypnotized into “remembering” being abducted by little grey men (what happened to all the little green men we grew up with?).

The antiquated concept of journalistic integrity aside, where are the editorial policies for these publications? Scientific evidence and grassroots anecdotes seem to have equal weight in veracity nowadays. These publishers should take an editorial stand. There’s little chance of skewing the truth if a paper firmly decides that nut jobs are nut jobs.

But no, the politically correct, expedient, and LAZY thing to do would be to give credence to the most ludicrous stories they can find. Conflicts of message and mindset do not exist in the absence of editorial policy. Anything gets printed, as long as it sells.

And that has become the one overriding, unwritten editorial policy of today’s newspapers: Sell newspapers.

(Hint to the publishers of any newspapers that haven’t folded yet: develop a cohesive journalistic personality, and keep in mind that there can be only one National Enquirer.)

Jim Lawter

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