It is a common occurrence, as I settle in with my daily morning newspaper and get halfway into a particular article, to find myself wondering, “Why am I reading this story?”

It’s never meant to be a rhetorical question. Whenever I ask it, I truly wish to know the answer, because what I’m actually asking is, “Why did somebody at the paper think this was important or significant?”

I had that sensation yesterday while reading an article in the News & Observer which ran below this headline: “Proposed road would push family out of longtime home.” It described how a rural family finds itself facing the prospect of being forced from the ancestral land by a road project that will serve — wait for it — the ever-voracious growth needs of the area (growth, of course, being an all-purpose issue of concern for journalists).

The story worked hard to make me feel a pang of pity for the family, invoking passages like this to help me understand the poignancy of the situation:

Her father had her helping drive the tractor by age 5, and she remembers how she and her four sisters used to wake up at 4 a.m. to take the tobacco out of the barn.

But I couldn’t help but notice that the “longtime home” in question was built in 1978, which hardly seems to qualify it as a historic homestead. Then there was the awkward fact that the neighborhood around the home, the development of which helped fuel the need for the new road, was built on land sold to the developer by the very same family that we are now asked to sympathize with. Also, it turns out that no one much disputes the fact that the road is needed, and that the town is considering adjustments in the road plan so that the family home would be saved.

None of this is to the reporter’s discredit. (I know him, and he’s a good guy and good journalist.) Instead, the article has the feel of being editor-driven — which is to say, an editor got fixed on a story line and whistled up a reporter to assemble the facts accordingly.

Why else would I be reading about a road that inconveniences only the person whose land sale created its need?

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 24th, 2008 at 1:01 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.