Some of you have seen me complain about our papers of record and how they routinely abandon journalistic integrity in their zeal for bias. Since some of you claim to have no idea what I'm talking about, I'm going to give you two examples from this weekend that exemplify why I have a hard time getting past A1 most of the time.

Saturday:
The leading article, "Trump threatens years-long shutdown" takes the right column of A1 before moving on to A4. The second paragraph begins with "In a rambling hour-long news conference.". The third paragraph begins with "Trump seemed to display little empathy for the 800,000 employees..." This is not reporting. These are assessments made by people whose job it is to report. I don't care if the assessments are right. Do your fucking jobs. Report the facts like you were supposedly trained to do. Leave the assessments to someone else.

Sunday was worse. The leading article (linked below) carries the following title in print, "Boxed in by a wall on border crisis". What follows is a essay that is long on bluster and short on facts. It invokes unnamed security experts and administration officials and offers very little in terms of verifiable information. What this is doing on A1 is beyond me. Like hell I'm going to follow this mess onto A7.

If this is what you want from one of your papers of record, knock yourself out. I maintain that this pattern is not only a waste of my time but also harmful to the national discourse. While the FT did not take the same approach to its articles in the latest issue, the reports did stay on point. Reports were thoroughly sourced so that you could see who (pundit, not journalist) was making a particular assessment and why. Readers who are interested in the points of view of the newspaper's editorial staff are directed to "Editorial comment, p.6". That's how you do it.