The American press is suffering from Bright's disease

Like many people who read newspapers, I go to the sports page first, the sports page being a chronicle of achievements, and the rest of the paper consisting mainly as a chronicle of failures. Yet today's sports page has become a dark place to dwell as well, for alongside a picture of a great shot at Wimbledon, we are exposed to the dark underbelly of sports.

BASEBALL: Jason Giambi of the Yankees has agreed to cooperate with George Mitchell's investigation into the use of performance-enhancing drugs in Major League Baseball, apparently becoming the first active player who has consented to speak with Mitchell. CYCLING: The 2007 Tour de France starts July 7, and Versus is faced with carrying the elite event of a sport whose credibility is at a nadir. "I'd like to believe we're in the final death spasms of the doping era," said Gavin Harvey, the president of Versus, which has rights to the race through next year.

FOOTBALL: Pacman Jones surrendered in Las Vegas and posted $20,000 bail on felony charges resulting from a strip club melee that preceded a triple shooting.

The time has come for our national newspapers to institute a "Sports in the Courts Page," and return the sports page to those of us who don't want our RBI's mixed with DUI's. The fact that Tank Johnson, already suspended for the first eight games of the 2007 season, was pulled over at three o'clock in the morning and cited for being impaired is of no interest to me when I am reading the sports page. Put it on the Sports in the Courts Page!

And while my blood pressure is up I might also take this time to blast the national press corps for force-feeding us Ms. Hilton.

Reading about Paris Hilton is like eating cotton candy for dinner, it will give you Bright's disease of the mind. Here is a personage who has never done anything in her sordid life to deserve notoriety, except amplify an American lifestyle that brings jeers from around the world: "See? See what you get with globalization?!"

I say designate Hilton and her ilk to a "Celebrity Journalism Page," where one could turn to find out who's dumping on whom.

The only escape that I can find from a national press corps suffering from Bright's disease is in reading foreign and local journals.

I site this squib from the People's Daily of China: "A Chinese hospital that performed the country's first face transplant has conducted a liver transplant without removing the original, which the hospital claims to be the first such surgery in the world."

Now that's news! That's news that will make a body's very liver curl with enjoyment.

So don't despair, as I have on occasion, but turn a cold shoulder to our national press, and go to the St. Petersburg Times, the Copenhagen Post, and the North Lake Tahoe Bonanza for a breath of fresh journalistic air that will put a little spring in your step...

McAvoy Layne lives in Incline Village and visits schools throughout Nevada as the ghost of Mark Twain.

source:www.tahoebonanza.com