The Editor's Desk

I’ll be at the Independence Day celebration Friday helping run the “beer garden” with my fellow Rotarians. Feel free to stop by and comment on anything you’d like to say about the content of the newspaper. And to buy some beer if you’re of age. The money is used to fund some of our local programs, such as the “Dictionary Project,” which provides free dictionaries to all Barstow area third graders every year.

Strangely, this will be the first time I’ve actually gotten to see Barstow’s fireworks show. Something has always prevented me from going out there until this year.

I had a very interesting conversation with a reader Tuesday. He had been an irregular reader of the Desert Dispatch but had recently started a full subscription. He had called because he was concerned that our opinion page “leaned” conservative. He had read one of Richard Reeb’s commentaries, but hadn’t yet seen one of Carol Jensen’s Monday pieces.

I explained to the caller that actually, my intent with the opinion page is to promote libertarian political views, while at the same time, accommodating other views as well.

There was one particularly illuminating moment in the conversation. Because he was more progressive, he was concerned that too much conservative opinion on the page, unchecked by an equal amount of progressive commentary, might influence people to believe in conservative politics.

In other words, he was concerned that we were encouraging people to believe in things that he didn’t want people to believe.

It was a real learning moment for me, because in my mind, of course the commentaries are trying to influence people to believe in the writer’s views — that’s what they’re for. The entire point of an opinion page is to influence and challenge what people believe.

But that’s not how the caller felt, and I should have probably known better. The rise of our pundit-based opinion culture has created a country where people believe the purpose of commentary is to validate what they believe. To tell them that they’re right and those other people are wrong. The purpose of running commentary from the “other side” is not for “balance,” like they want to believe. It’s so that they have somebody to be indignant about and prove wrong. The idea that there might actually be a third side (let alone a fourth or fifth) seems alien to people these days. Because Freedom Communication editorial writers have a libertarian perspective, we’ve been accused of being part of the “liberal media” when we write about individual rights and then accused of being “right wing pawns” when we write about property rights and support capitalism. There are people who really cannot perceive that there’s anything else out there.

The larger result has been bland, toothless opinion pages in other newspapers across the country, where editorials read like they’re written by a focus group and are designed to appeal to the pre-existing beliefs of the majority of the readership, not to actually influence anybody at all.

But I’m hopeful for change over the next 10 years. The fragmentation of the political parties might help. The increasing number of voices encouraging the Republican to turn back to a small-government mentality adds a new side to the discussion. Blogs have changed the dynamic in many ways — some just add to the pundit echo chamber, but a lot of them add nuance to the discussion, dissecting and pushing at the foundations of what we believe.

I will continue to try to challenge what people believe on our editorial page, and I don’t apologize for my — or any of my writers’ — efforts to actually influence people’s beliefs.

Premium finally hit $5 this week and reporter Abby Sewell put together a story. I’ve gotten a couple of calls and requests saying that the Desert Dispatch should report the cheapest gas prices in the community on a daily or weekly basis.

The biggest problem with such a plan (assuming we had staff members who could take the time to go around checking gas prices, which we don’t) is that the information would be collected one afternoon and then published the next morning. By this point the information is obsolete and would likely be incorrect. It simply wouldn’t actually be as useful as some people think it would be.

The solution to this problem is the easily updateable Internet, but even there we found a problem. A couple of weeks ago we a briefly added a widget from gasbuddy.com that allows people to search gas prices by Zip code. But the problem turned out to be that only a very small number of local gas stations participated — four or five if I recall. We did not get a good enough cross-section of gas prices for the tool to be useful or reliable. Ultimately, we took it off our site.

However, Gas Buddy also allows users to essentially join the site and contribute by reporting gas prices. If Barstow residents were willing to do so, we could develop a more reliable price check system so folks can better choose where to fill up the gas.

I’m in San Antonio this week for our annual “Freedom School,” where publishers and editors of Freedom Communications newspapers gather and hear from libertarian luminaries about the issues of the day and have questions answered about local issues.

I bring this up because there have been comments relevant to our gay marriage issue in California. I received an e-mail from a reader, who wrote in part in response to my Monday editorial: “I know lots of people, to include me, who have a big problem with four judges over turning 61% of the voting population to make 3% of the state’s population happy. Scott those four judges just ‘beat it’s citizens into submission’ and how can you NOT think that?”

It concerns me that somebody believes he has been beaten into submission because the government refused to allow him to beat others into submission. As I, and all libertarians, argue, the will of the people cannot be used as an excuse to violate the rights of individuals. As Tibor Machan said yesterday in our conference, “The people cannot confer upon the government powers that they don’t have.” He was elaborating on something Freedom Communications founder R.C. Hoiles believed, which was that groups don’t have the moral authority to do things that individuals aren’t allowed to do. You can’t go around deciding who can get married. Therefore, neither do 61 percent of Californians.

I didn’t blog that much in April or even write as many editorials as usual. I apologize, but there are two contributing circumstances. First, April has been a month for vacations (I just came back from Seattle myself) and whenever somebody is absent from the newsroom, we all have to fill in, given our small size, and it leaves me with little free time to work on commentary.

But the second, bigger reason is that we’re working on a redesign and a rethinking of the presentation of the Desert Dispatch. We’ve actually been planning it out for two years, and many Barstow residents have been consulted and shown some prototypes of what we’re considering.

Sadly, due to logistical issues, we aren’t able to make the most dramatic change we considered — turning the Desert Dispatch into a compact magazine-sized publication. We got very good feedback from the prototype, even from Barstow residents who tended toward more traditional attitudes about newspapers. It’s a concept we will revisit in the future if we can.

While we will be staying the same general format, we will be doing a lot of work on how we present stories. One of the messages we got from readers in our presentations last year was that, essentially, people getting the information they need easily was more important than any particular “style” of reporting. On more than one occasion, we had readers ask us why “Information Detail X” had not been published in the newspaper. Actually, I knew that “Information Detail X” had, in fact, been in our newspaper. But I knew that these details they couldn’t find were often buried in larger stories about meetings and projects. This meant these readers were not reading whole stories. There were bits and pieces of the story that mattered to them, but they didn’t care about or didn’t have time for all the bells and whistles.

So we’re looking at ways to pull out important details to make them more visible to our readers. You may have noticed some initial efforts in this matter over the last year as we strive to put more information “boxes” in our stories, pulling out important information and making it more visible for folks who don’t have time to read full stories.

We’re expecting to launch the redesign in June, and we’ll have more details as we formalize the changes.

I put up a new poll question this week asking folks what they’re going to do with their stimulus checks. It seems as though, so far, we’re not interested in the task of allegedly stimulating the economy with new purchases. Instead, most of the voters so far say they’ll use the check to pay down their debts and to pay for basic necessities. This is amusing in the sense that if the government hadn’t taken that money away from us in taxes in the first place, we might not have had the debt to pay down.

I too will be using the check to pay down debt, which will put me at 0-for-2 in using this money in the way the government wants me to. When we got the last “stimulus check” in 2001, I spent it all on a trip visiting some friends in Toronto, Canada, so all that money went to stimulate another nation’s economy.

I just can’t do anything the government wants me to do, can I?

A commenter on Jason Smith’s story about the financial problems of the Barstow Humane Society mentioned having a negative experience with the staff there and said others have reported the same.

I’ve heard this as well, but I have to say they were pretty accommodating to me when I adopted my dog, Xander, from there a little more than a year ago. They were no-nonsense about the whole thing, but I wouldn’t call them rude. I have a reputation for being pretty blunt myself, though, so it’s possible I just am not sensitive to that sort of behavior.

They were also very helpful when, not two weeks after I adopted Xander, he figured out how to unlatch the gate and escaped from my backyard. One of the employees recognized him a couple of days later out on the street, brought him back to the shelter, and I was able to bring him back home.

I’ll have an editorial in tomorrow’s paper about the Humane Society’s issues, but it should pop up online after 5 p.m. here in the editorial section if you don’t want to wait.

I succumbed to the mistake I’m most neurotic about in a recent editorial.

I wrote on Wednesday speculating that the CHP’s latest speeding enforcement drive coinciding with the governor’s budget cuts announcement was more of a show that they are a source of revenue of the state

A reader politely e-mailed me to inform me that the money from speeding tickets given by the CHP doesn’t go to the state — the money goes to county or city in which the driver is cited.

I’ve written here that one of my biggest concerns about writing editorials is presenting an opinion based on a factual foundation that proves to be incorrect, which is exactly what happened here. It should have occurred to me to think about the complex relationship between the state and county funding in California, but it did not.

I’ll have to make this right in an editorial next week. I do stand behind the rest of the editorial though, that a two-day publicized crackdown on speeders in the middle of the week is going to be unlikely to result in any sort of change in driver behavior on our stretch of Interstate 15.

The city’s Jeanette Hayhurst has pointed out (as well as a commenter on my latest editorial) that many of the rules the city is proposing for rental units in Barstow are no different from the HUD guidelines for Section 8 housing.
This may be true, but there are some very important differences that need to be understood to explain why landlords are coming out against the city’s draft plans.

HUD’s Section 8 guidelines:
• Participation in the program is completely voluntary. If landlords do not want to follow the strict guidelines to be a Section 8 household, they do not have to become part of the program.
• Compliance is encouraged through an incentive program. The federal government subsidizes the rents of landlords who follow the guidelines.

City of Barstow’s proposed rental program:
• Participation in the program is mandatory for all rental units with the city. If landlords do not want to participate, the city will attempt to force them to do so with court orders and search warrants.
• Compliance is demanded under threat of fine. The city of Barstow penalizes landlords who do not follow the guidelines.

Neither program is very good, as they both rely on wasteful and often capricious bureaucracy to enforce, but reading the comparison, it’s easy to see why exactly landlords are so upset. Rather than creating incentives, the city is creating punishments.

Much to my surprise, I’ve received a much stronger reaction to the proposed local rental inspection ordinance and my editorial expressing my opposition. And it turns out quite a number of Barstow residents are equally concerned about the violation of privacy and search and seizure protections.

I’ve received several calls and a couple of e-mailed comments about the issue, all in opposition to the city’s ordinance. A couple of days ago in the blog, I figured folks would support the ordinance as a way to (allegedly) help clean up Barstow.

As it was time for a new front page poll, I’ve put one up to gauge attitudes toward the proposed ordinance. Feel free to vote!