Crashing and dancing

This is not to disrespect the late Corey Lidle, who was a decent major league pitcher, but single-engine plane crashes that kill two people happen pretty frequently. That Lidle's plane crashed into an apartment tower in New York (the version published in the Enquirer was only eight paragraphs long) makes it a little more interesting, and that it happened in a city that that five years ago saw two jetliners flown by terrorists take down two skyscrapers and kill nearly 3,000 makes it a little more interesting still. But how it rises to become the main story on the front page of the Enquirer doesn't make sense, especially since this is a story better presented on television. Is there anything you saw in the Enquirer's coverage today that you didn't see on the evening news last night? This is lazy, go-with-the-crowd thinking by Enquirer editors.

And then, dear God, there's a Jerry Springer "Dancing With The Stars" story at the bottom of the front page. How sick is that? A better story would have been the one squeezed in above an ad on Page 3 revealing the Pentagon plans to keep troops in Iraq through 2010, but the Enquirer refuses to put any Iraq news on the front page.

Other thoughts:

• The Business page is too quick to call the Fountain Square redevelopment a "catalyst" for further development. The stadiums weren't catalysts, Tower Place wasn't a catalyst, the Aronoff Center wasn't a catalyst, the Underground Railroad Museum wasn't a catalyst. Believe me, this lousy $43 million investment in Fountain Square won't be a catalyst either, but since Enquirer publisher Margaret Buchanan is on the 3CDC board, we should expect this kind of cheerleading.
• Remember the Enquirer's lame profile of Tony Snow, a Cincinnati native, when he was named White House spokesman in April? (I don't blame you if you don't.) The big sin was saying that friends recall him as very liberal as a teenager, but then not explaining how his politics evolved to become more conservative. The Washington Post has a good piece today on Snow's performance as spokesman. You won't read it in the Enquirer because, first, it's long, and the Enquirer won't run a story that goes more than about 10 paragraphs. Second, the Enquirer doesn't run Washington Post stories because to save money, the Enquirer dumped the Post wire months ago.