Letter: Newspapers have big differences

Thursday, Sept. 4, 2003 | 9:07 a.m.

It's great to get the dual editorial pages of the Las Vegas Sun and Review-Journal every Sunday. Readers get to compare the contribution of each paper to the substance and style of our public discourse.

The contrast between the two papers on Sunday, Aug. 24, was striking. The Sun's Editorials page presented a crisply written editorial and a well-written column on subjects of immediate urgency to Nevadans. On the Opinion page the Sun included two outstanding columns, one by the ACLU's Gary Peck addressing the U.S.A. Patriot Act and another by the Washington Post's E.J. Dionne accurately describing the failure of the Bush/Rumsfeld war on Iraq.

In the Review-Journal, the typically ponderous editorials attacked the lifting of the five-year-long state hiring freeze now that we have a budget, and the protection of the privacy of medical patients under a 1998 statute signed by President Clinton. In the middle of the Review-Journal's editorial page is a typically sour and irrelevant column by Editor Thomas Mitchell. Headlined "Those ignorant and lazy voters," the column describes voters as "self-made ignoramuses" and it describes public-service organizations trying to improve voter turnout as "do gooder agencies."

It appears Mitchell targeted the wrong ignoramuses. On Page 9J of that edition of his paper, Mitchell headlined a news item, "Quiz show has ran 42 years." Nice editing, Tom.

JOSEPH M. HOGAN