On February 13, the Washington Post ran a short editorial criticizing the Bush Administration for not proposing enough (in their view) funding for improvements to state capital defense systems.
Given the Chronicle‘s anti-death-penalty editorial board, it was hardly a surprise to find a condensed version (approximately 340 words) of the old Post editorial making an appearance as “Another Voice” on the Chron editorial page yesterday.
We’ve previously noted that the editorials chosen by the Chron rarely represent other voices, but instead represent affirmation of Chron editorial board views (although usually they are written better) — making the snippets repetitive (not other) voices. When the newspaper starts pulling in short editorials from the Washington Times, New York Sun, or the Washington Examiner, then we can talk about other voices.
Still, one wonders why they waste precious print editorial space with this practice in the first place. Savvy news consumers read a variety of news sources online, and saw that Washington Post editorial in its entirety (sans the Chron chopping) over a week ago. Why clutter the print editorial pages with such “olds”?
