By her own admission, Tribune city editor Amany Ali has been gazing at the office computer screen again, and this can only mean that the newspaper’s long-suffering Sunday readers are about to be taken on another bullet-train excursion to the very heart of journalistic banality.
“Fish are meant to be eaten,” chortles the headline above today’s “tirade,” during which Ali titters like a school girl through 16 paragraphs of depressingly stillborn sarcasm on the pressing topic of the Fish Empathy Project, a campaign against eating marine life masterminded by PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals).
Dismissing PETA with all the wit and grace of talk radio caller, Ali’s offers an argument against empathy for fish that goes something like this: As a diet component, fish are “nutritious and uncontroversial,” and like other animals that God placed on the planet, they taste great “after a few flips on the barbecue grill.”
Fish are neither “interesting’ nor “fascinating,” and they merit no time for discussion beyond that required to locate healthy and good tasting examples at the “cheapest price” for cooking in some way that doesn’t stink up the kitchen too much.
In closing, Ali declares, “Salmon, and every other kind of fish, was meant to be eaten,” even invoking God as proof of her assertion, but providing no testimony as to which of the many Gods worshipped hereabouts has clued her in to this truth, and by which means of communication the press release was conveyed.
Tellingly, Ali briefly mentions PETA’s objections to commercial fishing practices, which indeed are extremely controversial throughout the carnivorous world irrespective of the nutrient value of the factory ship catch, but predictably she possesses not a sliver of willingness to give this aspect of the topic its due, because to do so would require thinking, reading, asking questions and working at it – and it’s much easier to take sophomoric potshots at those strange PETA people than to refute their platform.
Of course, debatable notions of fish empathy aren’t really the central point in all this. I’ve continued to eat meat and fish even after a close reading of PETA’s platform. Also, the organization is as deserving of incisive, clever, pointed satire as any other lobby group operating in the public arena. It’s even possible that Ali thought she was writing such a piece prior to the “we don’t need no education” primal scream that was committed to paper.
The point is that PETA espouses a worldview and advances a position that itself represents a thoughtful synthesis of scientific research, reasoned argumentation, and philosophical speculation. PETA has done its homework, and one doesn’t have to agree with the group’s conclusions to instinctively recognize that it is deserving of a response in like fashion, one emanating from a higher plane than that of hurling anti-intellectual brickbats at something that a person is unwilling or unable to understand.
Call me old fashioned, but journalists are obliged to play by different, more stringent standards.
This, in turn, leads us to the larger issue for Tribune readers. It is widely understood that the Tribune is a small newspaper with limited resources, one devoted primarily to producing an acceptable profit margin for its corporate ownership by running items of local interest – sports, wedding, legal announcements and the like – in between as many advertisements as possible.
However, being instructed to write at an 8th-grade level for a semi-literate readership is one thing, but doing so doesn’t necessarily imply that the thoughts expressed therein are condemned to be 8th-grade ideas.
We don’t read the Tribune expecting to find “War and Peace” inexplicably lurking within, but by the same token, why must articles like Ali’s PETA screed openly and unapologetically advocate the sort of sneering, fear-mongering, anti-intellectual mediocrity that has afflicted this city for so long?
Just below Ali’s lamentable “tirade” is a short but intelligent and well-written survey of Thanksgiving and pre-Christmas traditions by guest columnist Terry Cummins, a retired high school educator.
The contrast is vivid. One thinks, one doesn’t.
One gets paid.
One doesn’t.
That, my friends, is the real problem.
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