Signs of the Times

There’s an cynical newspaper saying that goes, “All the news that fits.” A play on the New York Times‘ motto, “All the news that’s fit to print,” the former adage refers to the amount of physical space available in the newsprint pages designated for the day’s product. As the cost of newsprint kept climbing and space for articles shrank, both the variety and size of newspaper stories got smaller, hence, “All the news that fits.”

You’d think that with the seemingly infinite space on the Web, we’d never have a shortage of room to publish all the news that’s fit to blog about. But we all know, as brevity’s the soul of wit and less is more, just because we can put everything into one blog post doesn’t mean we should. So not everything interesting or quirky or thought-provoking that I find in my news feeds makes it into Xenia’s In the Press section. Maybe they’re too short or too partisan or a little too cynical (or too funny). But here’s a few things from this week that didn’t make it onto the In the Press spotlight, but they’re still good to know and good food for thought for the weekend:

Sheriff Refuses to Evict Tenants  |  Alas, a Blog

Ampersand at Alas, a Blog points to a story from CNN about a sheriff in Florida who’s taking a stand against mortgage companies evicting renters from foreclosed properties:

He said many of the evictions involve renters who are paying their rent on time but are being thrown out because the landlord has fallen behind on mortgage payments.

Mortgage companies are supposed to identify a building’s occupants before asking for an eviction, but sheriff’s deputies routinely find that the mortgage companies have not done so, he said.

“These mortgage companies only see pieces of paper, not people, and don’t care who’s in the building,” Dart said. “They simply want their money and don’t care who gets hurt along the way. “On top of it all, they want taxpayers to fund their investigative work for them. We’re not going to do their jobs for them anymore. We’re just not going to evict innocent tenants. It stops today.”

The Registration Edge  |  Ben Smith @Politico

Politico blogger Ben Smith posted a snip from an Associated Press story showing the increase in the number of registrations of Democrats over Republicans since the last presidentical election in 2004.

20/20: You’re Too Young and Too Dumb to Vote  |  Crooks and Liars

Crooks and Liars criticizes a report by the ABC news magazine 20/20 over a report by John Stossel. The blog says the report was edited in such a way to prove Stossel’s viewpoint that young viewers are too uninformed on the issues and should stay at home on Nov. 4 instead of voting. According to the blog:

According to Head Count, Stossel’s team cherry-picked responses for their piece, giving the impression that respondents were far less knowledgeable than they were. “Far more … were knowledgeable than implied by the report” and:

Many interviewees were knowledgeable about some issues, but less so when it came to other issues. The young voter responses included in the report were cherry-picked by Stossel and ABC producers to highlight only the incorrect answers.

Indeed, the show’s one producer got into an argument with one young voter when the producer tried to say that the length of single term for a congressional representative was four years. The “young and dumb” voter had the correct answer of two years.

Ayers Attack Piquing Curiosity, But Perhaps Little Else  |  FiveThirtyEight

The FiveThirtyEight blog points out that since the campaign of John McCain began stressing linkages between former Weather Underground frontmant Bill Ayers and Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama, Ayers’ Wikipedia page has been accessed “between 40,500 and 96,000 times over each of the past five days.” But they’ve done little else, according to the blog.