Getting late to yesterday’s (Sunday’s) Chi Trib Metro section, I ran across a story about Vickie Quade and Maripat Donovan in federal court about who owns “Late Nite Catechism,” the immensely successful Catholic-nostalgia monologue in which Donovan plays a histrionic nun.  Having met Quade once, I read on . . . and on and on, to the end, so well was the story done, by Josh Noel, a hard-working, prolific Metro reporter.  How many law suit stories have I tried to read and found turgid and confusing.  Not this one, which is full of detail and clear.

Then I found another story, also by Noel, about Rogers Park cops removing a street corner memorial to a dead gang member, so identified by the police commander.  How many such stories have I read that interview survivors who say he was kind to his little sister and cops who say he was an outlaw with implication he got what he deserved.  Not this one, which used its ample Sunday-paper space to pursue details of the matter and leaven it with intelligent commentary not just by the commander Bruce Rottner (I think of Loyola U. basketball star of the 40s, Mickey Rottner) but also by a U. of Chi academic of 55 years experience.  Again, detailed and clear.

Noel knows what he’s doing.

From the files:

DUCK, HERE COME FACTS . . .

As for what reporters write, it makes us dumb, says U. of Florida history prof C. John Sommerville, author of How the News Makes Us Dumb: The Death of Wisdom in an Information Society, as reported on the UF website 4/26/99 by Cathy Keen. It’s the nature of the beast, says Sommerville, in that it subjects us to a “daily, and often hourly, barrage of disassociated facts.”

It’s the daily-hourly part that does it to us. Each day has its front page and headlines – though headlines vary in size, to be sure. Each elicits at least comparable interest. Newspapers can’t wait for the important to happen. (Slow news day mean something minor gets played big – remember Bob Newhart’s explaining why so much was made of the U.S. sub shelling Miami by mistake?)

If they did wait for something important, says Sommerville, “they might be idle for weeks and their capital assets would get rusty.” So they approach every day as “worthy of the same attention.” (Yes and no; again, some headlines are bigger than others.)

Moreover, news doesn’t reflect the world, it tells what went wrong.

LOOK SMART . . .

And so on. Trouble is, for every point Sommerville makes, I think of an objection. When he gets to solutions, however, I’m with him. He’s for reading books and magazines. He stopped reading newspapers several years ago but still knows what people are talking about.

It’s true, you can pick up a lot on the fly. A salesman told me he routinely checks the sports pages of any city he’s visiting – in the daily paper, to be sure – before making his calls. That way, he can chat up the most enthusiastic fan. For that matter, the more enthusiastic, the more the fan wants to do the talking anyhow. A salesman can look very wise and interesting by keeping his mouth shut.

In the Jesuits we were (once) advised never to read a newspaper sitting down. That way, you wouldn’t be tempted to linger over the ephemeral. And what do you think? Latin for daily paper is “ephemeridae,” as in here ephemeridae, gone tomorrow.

We were indeed (regularly) warned against “desultory” reading, meaning without purpose, on the fly. As incipient scholars we were rather to program ourselves. I met one of us in the library once of a summer’s day poring over an art book – the best of Western Civ, that sort of thing. Desultory? Nope, he wanted to be at least somewhat versed in what an educated man knew. Off he went, eventually, to be a theologian, but like the newspaper-perusing salesman ready to look wise and sound interesting to the enthusiastic art fan.

Good Wash Times story here about “faith-based whistleblowing”: speakers-up for safety motivated by religion hold a convention, for God’s sake, in DC.  E.g.,

Joe Carson, a nuclear safety engineer at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, [who] said it was his Christian worldview that impelled him to blow the whistle 19 times since 1990 on workplace and public-safety hazards at the Department of Energy, guardian of the nation’s nuclear stockpile.  “Whistleblowers are thinking of what’s good for others, not just looking out for number one,” said Mr. Carson, 51.

And there’s the Exodus-citing Jewish lawyer, the Lutheran who quotes Matthew, the Methodist pastor, the Catholic FBI agent, and a cast of dozens more due in town Sept. 23 for a meeting of Whistleblowers for an Honest, Efficient and Accountable Government at the Watergate Hotel. 

If I were still in the business, I’d want to cover that meeting, which effort would include, I presume, some wetting of one’s own whistle in off hours.