City And They Wonder Why They’re Losing Young Readers
Today’s front-page PI story makes it plain that the Seattle Times editorial board is isolated and marginalized on the teen dance issue.
We had gotten a quote from Nickels’s spokesperson Marty McOmber saying there was no connection between the CHAC event and the murders: McOmber told the Stranger, “there is nothing to connect the rave to the shooting at the house on Saturday morning. Raves are well-regulated events, and by all accounts the rave at CHAC on Friday night was well operated. We do know that we don’t want to drive this scene underground.”
But now the PI has the mayor himself contradicting the Seattle Times’s reactionary advocacy.
“This is not about music, this is not about a party. This was about a guy who decided he was going to kill people and he had the firepower to do it,” Nickels said.
Ha. They even got former city attorney Mark Sidran to pooh-pooh the Seattle Times’s weird spin.
“Some tragedies defy any sort of rational response in terms of regulation because they’re completely irrational events you can’t really predict or prevent,” said Sidran, who defended the Teen Dance Ordinance, which was enacted in the mid-1980s. Sidran said, “This kind of homicidal psychopathic violence is not what the Teen Dance Ordinance was about and is just a terrible tragedy.”
I don’t imagine the Seattle Times will give up on its crusade against teens, though. (Expect more articles soon.)
But they’d be wise to consider giving it a rest. After all, haven’t they been smarting over the fact that they’ve been losing young readership? (According to a Scarborough research study, only 40 percent of people aged 18 to 24 read a daily paper on weekdays.) And papers like the Seattle Times wonder why. Perhaps it has something to do with their outdated editorial positions.
Easy answer: Bring back NEXT.