Lite News for a Heavy Time: is it even possible to know what the Miami Herald is thinking? by gimleteye

Sunday's top of the fold story: "Train thief took a 120-ton joy ride" is still bugging me. Perhaps Herald executives commissioned a public opinion poll showing people are attracted like bees to pollen by train stories, and, joy rides. Any how, the depression zeitgeist is lite news for a heavy time. (click 'read more')
I would have been looking for another kind of story of joy rides. One of enough consequence to compel readers to pick up the newspaper. For instance: how Herald advertisers from the production home building industry took the nation on a joy ride, urged on by local bankers feeding financial derivatives tied to mortgages, making millions at every slice and dice along the way, destroying wetlands and drinking water aquifers, before crashing the economy into a wall, climbing out of the car and running away from the scene of the crime.

Of the MBA's who were driving the train, the New York Times reports, "It's so obvious that something big has failed," said Angel Cabrera, dean of the Thunderbird School of Global Management in Glendale, Ariz. "We can look the other way but come on. The CEO's of those companies, those are people we used to brag about. We cannot say, "Well it wasn't our fault" when there is such a systemic, wide-spread failure of leadership." (Is it Time to Retrain B-Schools, New York Times, March 15, 2009)

The comment echoed something I had just read in a fantastic account of wrack and ruin of Florida's environment, "Paving Paradise: Florida's Vanishing Wetlands and the Failure of No Net Loss." The writers report an internal email of one National Park Service official representing the Everglades against the predatory practices of rock miners in the Lake Belt region of West Miami Dade, "Florida is in a state of cannibalism, eating itself to increase its infrastructure."

Isn't it interesting the the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, built by the Herald fortune and supervised by successive Miami Herald retired publishers, has never funded journalism to this effect: how to assess the cannibalism masked as Chamber of Commerce values? Talk about joy rides.