Unlike the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times doesn’t have a motto. But if it did, this would work: All the news that’s fit to print for people who don’t know any better, reported by those who don’t want you to.
Exhibit 7,593,648: A front-page story on how the drought is affecting food supplies and therefore restaurant prices—ergo, the entire (inflated) economy.
Smokin’ Jonny’s BBQ opened less than a year ago, but pricey corn on the cob has already disappeared from the menu.Rising beef prices are causing owner Jon Sekiguchi headaches as well. His Gardena restaurant sells beef ribs only on the weekends, when customers are more willing to splurge. And he’s struggling to find affordable beef sausage for his $6.95 smoked sausage sandwich.Scorching weather this summer in the Midwest left crops parched and livestock famished. Restaurants, already struggling with high fuel costs and a sluggish economy, are starting to feel the pinch of higher food costs.
And so it goes, for 900 words and several other sad examples. Yet not once in all that space does reporter Tiffany Hsu manage to use the word ethanol.
It’s hard to accept that no one at the Times is aware of the unintended consequences like escalating food prices that people who know such things warned about when the country decided to turn its cornfields into a social-engineering petri dish. But if so, why? Anguished synopses of the crisis have appeared in several publications that can’t be dismissed as Koch brothers house organs. For instance, the Washington Post:
The worst U.S. drought in half a century has hampered the country’s corn production and caused plenty of worry about the rising cost of food worldwide. But the spike also raises a policy question. Should the United States now suspend its rules that divert a hefty portion of the U.S. corn crop—40 percent, by some counts—into ethanol fuel for cars and trucks?
Of course, when you employ writers capable of describing Joe Biden a day after the vice presidential debate as having played the role of “kindly old ward healer” without mentioning the veep’s bullying and creepy laughter (“He interrupted Ryan a fair number of times”), you’re peddling a worldview from those who see what they believe, not a view of the world from those obliged to believe what they see.
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