Katelynn McGinley’s editorial in the last issue of the Free Press bothered me for a few reasons, and none of them political. My one major criticism of the Free Press is that many of its editorials can be unpolished or overly simplistic; “The Bailout: America’s April Fools Joke” is really a perfect example.
McGinley’s editorial needed serious revision before publication and as a section editor for the Free Press, she really ought to know better. Ultimately, the editorial has two major flaws.
First, McGinley, in writing an editorial about A.I.G. and the controversy surrounding their retention bonuses, reduces a fairly complex situation into “Your tax dollars are being used to reward executives of this company for sucking?” Obviously editorials aren’t supposed to be impartial, but the editorial barely defines the thing it’s angry about before it goes straight into a full-on rant.
There is no attempt to explain specifically how A.I.G. executives “sucked” or even why she thinks they’re being rewarded.
Then the editorial takes its first complete out-of-left-field turn and McGinley goes on about “Domino’s Bailout Pizza deals,” adding, “Nothing sells pizza like an economy that’s in the toilet.”
It’s this line that brings us to the other real problem of McGinley’s editorial, which is that it goes off on tangents that have almost nothing to do with the topic at hand. What does a promotional campaign for pizza have to do, at all, with A.I.G. or the bailout plan on any kind of substantive level?
It has nothing to do with either of them, but there it sits, awkwardly, at the center of the editorial. The closest analogy I can think of is if President Obama decided to throw in a reference to hating Geico commercials in a speech about healthcare reform. It’s completely out of place and I can’t be the only person left scratching their head about this.
I went into the next paragraph optimistic; it starts off discussing how there are viable reasons for bailing out major corporations, but all that hope disappeared when I discovered that, instead of some actual insight into this, McGinley decided to devote the second half of her editorial to the porn industry’s plea to Congress for bailout money.
This leads into rant number two where she decided this had a remote possibility of even being considered by politicians, and explains how college kids, doctors and teachers need that money more. Miss McGinley is certainly welcome to her opinion, but once again I have no clue what this has to do with the real issues at hand.
Even if this isn’t a publicity stunt by the porn industry, which I have to believe it is, the actual specifics of the bailout plan itself, or even the topic of executive bonuses that she began the editorial with would’ve made for better topics to discuss in her editorial. McGinley ends her editorial with a stern “Get your priorities straight, America”. I would argue that her editorial needs to do the same.
