“Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for country.”
There aren’t many rules more fundamental to printing a passable newspaper than the insistence that phrases within quotation marks present exactly what was written, or spoken, by the subject. When newspapers fail to deliver on that basic premise they fail to justify their own existence.
Postmedia operates dozens of newspapers around the country, and while the quality of many of them has likely suffered under their ownership, few can be as terrible as the St. Catharines Standard. Today, March 29, 2016, the front page of that paper contains an article that not only fails to meet the basic standard of transcribing a quotation correctly, but also miscites that same quotation.
In that article, the author makes an attempt, presumably, to invoke Samuel Johnson’s words: “Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel.” Johnson’s words were cited in James Boswell’s Life of Johnson, which is in the public domain and can be checked to ensure accurate citation by anyone with an internet connection.
The front page of The Standard printed, within quotation marks, “Patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel.” It might not seem like much, the difference in article between “a” and “the”. For a publication that has any illusions of being good it is everything. Either what you print is accurate, or it isn’t. Citing the wrong subject presents a whole other level of what is either indifference or incompetence.
That misquotation was to be found after this bit of excellence:
The refugees were among those who recently moved into the Days Inn in St. Catharines after they had leave their Hamilton hotels to make room for concertgoers attending the Garth Brooks shows in that city.
In what level of school would sentences like that get a passing grade? That was found not on a grade three writing assignment but on the front page of a daily newspaper. That bears repeating: “had leave their Hamilton hotels” was found on the front page of a daily newspaper.
I will come back to my out of place lead sentence now. By the standards set by The Standard, I can implore you to recall the words once written by myself, “Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for country.” The fact that the quotation is neither correctly attributed to President Kennedy’s inaugural address nor even accurate should fail to be of any importance. It is only inaccurate by a word, and I did write it: right there in line one.
There is an environment of what is either incompetence or indifference at that newspaper. It doesn’t really matter which one it is, although indifference may be more insulting to what readers remain.
One would think that someone whose name is associated with such consistent garbage would have some shame about it, and at the very least endeavour to do better.
Not so at The Standard. The editor-in-chief has made it clear how proud he is of the work they do there. Those don’t sound like the words of someone intent on perpetual improvement of processes going forward, and they also don’t sound like the words of someone who would do the right thing and resign.
Postmedia is in the midst of lobbying to allow even more foreign ownership of media in Canada. Why? To preserve the quality news they publish every day? The simple truth is there is no quality in the areas that need it most. And not “no quality” in that the editorial voice of a newspaper is for sale. “No quality” in that newspapers can no longer be trusted to perform the most basic functions of presenting quotations accurately or presenting decent sentences.
The Toronto Star wrote on January 30, 2016,
Postmedia is giving private ownership of an essential public service a bad name. Its charade of pretending to operate its papers in the public interest cannot end soon enough.
Clearly, absentee ownership does not care what garbage runs on pages under their name, otherwise there would have been changes a long time ago. Just as clearly, the perpetrators of this garbage don’t have the dignity required to resign. The insultingly low quality, then, is set to continue into the foreseeable future. The message to Niagara is that they are not worthy of a quality product, and that is a shame.