THE LOCAL RAG

Grand Rapids is a middling, middle-sized, Midwestern city, so doesn't that entitle us to at least a mediocre a daily newspaper?  Some of my latest gripes about the Grand Rapids Press ...

[1] On June 27th the Press reported that the Grand Rapids police conducted a sting resulting in the arrest of eight men on the charge of soliciting a prostitute.  Fine, that's a good local news story EXCEPT that the names of the arrested men were missing from the article.  The news is not that the cops nabbed some johns.  Prostitution in River City is not a surprise.  The news is who the johns were.  That's what a reader wants to know.

[2] On July 2nd the Press abandoned any pretense of objectivity and instead splashed a big article on Page Three cheerleading for the Grand Rapids public schools (GRPS).  The Press crowed that students in the City school system increased their scores in most categories over last year on the statewide standardized Michigan Educational Assessment Program (MEAP) tests, while letting school board vice president, Amy McGlynn, glow unchallenged about all the "hard work" the GRPS has done to achieve this remarkable result.  Unreported is that fact that although the 2005 MEAP scores are better than 2004, they remain below (with one exception) the 2003 scores.

Moreover, all this pathetic high-fiving is over a comparison of one set of horrible scores to another set of horrible scores.  On a scale of 100, GRPS students scored 36 in math, 54 in reading, 36 in writing, 46 in "English Language Arts" (apparently something other than reading and writing), 39 in science, and 23 in social studies.  Of the twenty Kent County public school districts, only tiny, miserable Godfrey-Lee produced simlarly abysmal results.  Most of the districts posted results that were typically 50% to 100% better than the GRPS.

But reporting any of this wouldn't be happy fun news, would it?

[3] Having turned its news pages into cheerleading editorials for River City's failing institutions, it appears that the Grand Rapids Press has turned its editorial page over to out-and-out propaganda for the machinations of the Amway pyramid-builders.  We've reported before on the Press's gushing editorials on the late Jay Van Andel's namesake research institute and the not-so-late Rich DeVos's taxpayer-subsidized hotel venture downtown.  On July 2nd the Press went to bat for DeVos again with an embarrassingly strained justification of the big price hike by Spectrum Health, the area's healthcare monstrosity created by DeVos with the merger of Butterworth and Blodgett hospitals in 1997.  The big argument the Press pitched to get us to swallow the price hike was that we aren't entitled to the low healthcare prices we enjoyed during competition between Butterworth and Blodgett.  Instead we should be happy paying much higher prices like other parts of the U.S.

Little wonder why the Press is printing such garbage.  Its publisher, Danny Gaydou, was designated by DeVos as his successor as chairman of the newly created Spectrum Health, and both Gaydou and DeVos carry on today as members of Spectrum's board.  Gaydou's in the tank for DeVos and will now polish the turd of DeVos's big merger project as brightly as he can.  Meanwhile, all of River City's healthcare consumers are waiting for the savings that merger was promised to bring us.