Opinion/Engagement Editor Matt Christensen [ 208-735-3255 • mchristensen@magicvalley.com ]
• Sunday, May 24, 2015
LETTER FROM THE EDITOR
The Numbers Behind the News
I OPINION “When a train derails on a speed-limited curve, there is one inescapable conclusion: The train was speeding.We look forward to deposing the memory-impaired engineer as to what he remembers happening.” Defense lawyer Robert Mongeluzzi on Amtrak engineer Brandon Bostian, who was operating the train that derailed in Philadelphia earlier this month.
can hardly explain to my wife what goes on in this small glass office where I toil each day, let alone articulate the concept of a newspaper to hundreds of fifth-graders. But there I was Wednesday, standing on the dirt floor of the College of Southern Idaho’s Expo Center with our circulation manager, Janae Hymas, struggling to explain in eight minutes or less how we manage to fill and print scores of news pages a week and deliver them throughout a coverage area roughly the size of Massachusetts. All before your morning coffee. The center was packed with police cars, fire trucks and tractors and all sorts of other rigs representing businesses across the Magic Valley. This field trip aimed to teach fifth-graders something about jobs in town.
Matt Christensen Editor
At 10 years old, not many kids wish to grow up to cover city council meetings. As I talked, I noticed more than a few eyes wander beyond our news van to the police car on the corner or the fire truck parked in back. These jobs — not mine — are careers to which fifth-graders aspire. “Raise your hand if you’ve ever been in the paper,” I asked each group of a dozen or so students who cycled by our station. About half the hands in each group went up. “Raise your hand if you want to be in the paper.” Every hand went up. All fifth-graders, it seems, want to be at least a little famous.
But most dazzling to these young minds were a few facts I shared about our business. I’d like to share them with you, too. • The Times-News was first published in October 1904. It was eight pages, and a subscription cost $2 a year. • Today, the Times-News has 87 full- and part-time employees and an annual payroll of more than $3 million. • We print a newspaper that reaches 31,500 readers a day in a delivery area of about 10,000 square miles. • We produce about 149,000 papers a week and 7.9 million papers a year, including the TimesNews, The Voice and other products. • Almost half the folks who read our news online do so on a smartphone or tablet. • We use about 33,000 press plates a year. They’re recycled after they are used
to print pages. • Our black ink tank holds 4,500 gallons, enough to fill an above-ground swimming pool. • Our press can produce up to 40,000 copies per hour. • It takes about two hours to print each day’s paper, including time for roll changes. • Each roll of our newsprint is seven miles long. We use between 65 and 70 rolls a week. At the end of eight minutes, the students shuffled through the dirt to the next vehicle. Perhaps they pondered how long it would take to color a seven-milelong sheet of paper. And maybe — just maybe — the seeds of a dream to cover city council meetings.
Christensen is editor of the Times-News. Reach him at 208-735-3255 and mchristensen@magicvalley.com.
OUR VIEW
Time to Talk About BASE Jumping
W
hen James E. Hickey stepped off the Perrine Bridge on May 7, his parachute already in a ball of fire, and fell 486 feet to his death, he crossed a line from which his sport may never come back. His death in an outrageous stunt is forcing BASE jumpers — and community leaders and residents of the Magic Valley — to take a sobering look at the sport. Hickey is not the first BASE jumper to die at the Perrine Bridge, and he won’t be the last. BASE jumpers have been perishing here at a steady clip since about 1990. It’s the only tall bridge in the United States where jumpers can leap any time they like with no permit. And so the deaths have become blasé. Well, we say whenever a jumper dies, he knew the risks. Besides, jumpers come from all over the world to leap from the Perrine Bridge, and they spend money on food and hotel rooms here. We’d hate to lose the money. But we can no longer continue to count the cash as bodies pile up on the canyon floor. That line of thinking must end. Forcing the community to weigh economic benefits against the value of human life is, frankly, disgusting. To borrow a line from Bob Dylan: “How many deaths will it take ‘till we know that too many people have died?” The answer is blowing in
R TIMES-NEWS FILE PHOT
Professional BASE jumper Miles Daisher does a gainer high over the Snake River Canyon during the 8th annual Perrine Bridge Festival in 2013.
the wind — at the end of a parachute. The local BASE jumping community must come forward and play a leadership role for the sake of their sport. Hickey’s act must be publicly condemned. And there must be assurances made that similar stunts won’t be tolerated. Anything less, and it won’t be long before folks start calling for a BASE jumping ban at the Perrine Bridge. A good first step was canceling an event planned for October that would have had as many as 200 jumpers hurling themselves off the bridge in a festival-style free-for-all. Local BASE jumpers said they worried the event could have cast the sport in an even worse light — especially if there was another death — in the wake of Hickey’s stunt and the rescue of a California woman who got stuck dangling from the bridge earlier this month.
Accidents here and the deaths of two high-profile BASE jumpers at Yosemite have put the sport in the national spotlight. Video of Hickey’s death went viral. Around the world last week, Twin Falls was synonymous with a man falling to his death in a ball of fire. Is this the reputation we want for our community? So it is time for a community conversation about BASE jumping, and it starts with local leaders in the sport. How can we preserve BASE jumping? Should we? How do we prevent more stunts like the one that killed Hickey? And what role do we all play in this? There aren’t easy answers. But this much is clear: Hickey upped the ante. And unless we pull the chute now and have a serious discussion about BASE jumping, the sport’s future in the Magic Valley risks a flaming free-fall to the canyon floor.
READER COMMENT
Getting It Right for US Veterans
I
n March, I wrote about working with Idaho veterans to press for needed changes to the Veterans Choice Program to ensure that Idaho veterans can access the services they so greatly deserve. Thankfully, the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs recently made needed changes to its policy regarding private health care access for veterans that means more veterans can get health care closer to home without traveling distances to VA care facilities. The Veterans Choice Program offers the alternative of care in a private medical facility if veterans live 40 miles or more from the closest VA medical center, clinic or facility. However, the VA’s original implementation of this program left many veterans unable to access the program’s benefits due to the VA measuring
You Want Hypotheticals? Here’s One
Mike Crapo Idaho Senator
40-miles “as the crow flies” rather than by driving distance. This was discriminatory for many veterans, including many in Idaho. Given our mountainous terrain, distances traveled by care can be far greater than simple air miles. I have been disappointed with the VA’s efforts to make the Choice Program difficult to use when improved access to high-quality veterans services is greatly needed. That is why I joined legislative and written efforts to get the VA to change course. I co-sponsored S. 207, the Veterans Access to Community Care Act of 2015 that would require the VA to consider
distance by driving miles and begin measuring the 40-mile distance from the nearest facility that provides the service needed by the veteran rather than the closest VA facility in general. Additionally, I joined Senate colleagues in pushing back against the president’s request for Congress to allow the VA to move the funds for the Veterans Choice Program into other VA accounts. We urged VA Secretary Robert McDonald to act quickly to address the problems with the Veterans Choice Program and implement the program as Congress intended. I will continue to push the VA to allow veterans seeking specialty care to utilize the program. Secretary McDonald’s recent announcement that highway miles will be the new standard for measuring distances and
availability for treatment in private health facilities is a step in the right direction. In making the announcement, McDonald stated, “This update to the program will allow more veterans to access care when and where they want it. We look forward to continued dialogue with veterans and our partners to help us ensure continued improvements for veterans to access care.” The Veterans Access, Choice and Accountability Act of 2014 was intended to provide veterans relief, not extra bureaucratic hurdles. I will continue to rely heavily on the valuable input of Idaho veterans as I continue to work to make sure that Idaho veterans can properly access the services they need. Thank you to all the Idaho veterans who have provided the insight necessary to improve veterans programs.
amadi falls. The Iraqi army flees. The great 60-nation antiIslamic State coalition so grandly proclaimed by the Obama administration is nowhere to be seen. Instead, it’s the defense minister of Iran who flies into Baghdad, an unsubtle demonstration of who’s in charge — while the U.S. air campaign proves futile and America’s alleged strategy for combating the Islamic State is in freefall. It gets worse. The Gulf States’ top leaders, betrayed and bitter, ostentatiously boycott President Obama’s failed Camp David summit. “We were America’s best friend in the Arab world for 50 years,” laments Saudi Arabia’s former intelligence chief. Note: “were,” not “are.” We are scraping bottom. Following six years of President Obama’s steady and determined withdrawal from the Middle East, America’s standing in the region has collapsed. And yet the question incessantly asked of the various presidential candidates is not about that. It’s a retrospective hypothetical: Would you have invaded Iraq in 2003 if you had known then what we know now? First, the question Is not just a hypothetical, but an inherently impossible hypothetical. It contradicts itself. Had we known there were no weapons of mass destruction, the very question would not have arisen. The premise of the war You want hypotheticals? Here’s one the basis for going to the U.N., to the Congress and, indeed, to the nation You want hypotheticals? Here’s one was Iraq’s possession of WMD in violation of the central condition for the cease-fire that ended the first Gulf War. No WMD, no hypothetical to answer in the first place. Second, the “if you knew then” question implicitly locates the origin and cause of the current disasters in 2003. As if the fall of Ramadi was predetermined then, as if the author of the current regional collapse is George W. Bush. This is nonsense. The fact is that by the end of Bush’s tenure, the war had been won. You can argue that the price of that victory was too high. Fine. We can debate that until the end of time. But what is not debatable is that it was a victory. Bush bequeathed to Obama a success. By whose measure? By Obama’s. As he told the troops at Fort Bragg on Dec. 14, 2011, “We are leaving behind a sovereign, stable, and self-reliant Iraq, with a representative government that was elected by its people.” This was, said the president, a “moment of success.” Which Obama proceeded to fully squander. With the 2012 election approaching, he
Charles Krauthammer Washington Post
chose to liquidate our military presence in Iraq. We didn’t just withdraw our forces. We abandoned, destroyed or turned over our equipment, stores, installations and bases. We surrendered our most valuable strategic assets, such as control of Iraqi airspace, soon to become the indispensable conduit for Iran to supply and sustain the Assad regime in Syria and cement its influence all the way to the Mediterranean. And, most relevant to the fall of Ramadi, we abandoned the vast intelligence network we had so painstakingly constructed in Anbar province, without which our current patchwork operations there are largely blind and correspondingly feeble. The current collapse was not predetermined in 2003 but in 2011. Isn’t that what should be asked of Hillary Clinton? We know you think the invasion of 2003 was a mistake. But what about the abandonment of 2011? Was that not a mistake? Mme. Secretary: When you arrived at State, al-Qaeda in Iraq had been crushed and expelled from Anbar. The Iraqi government had from Basra to Sadr City fought and defeated the radical, Iranian-proxy Shiite militias. Yet today these militias are back, once again dominating Baghdad. On your watch, we gave up our position as the dominant influence over a “sovereign, stable, and self-reliant Iraq” You want hypotheticals? Here’s one forfeiting that position gratuitously to Iran. Was that not a mistake? And where were you when it was made? Iraq is now a battlefield between the Sunni jihadists of the Islamic State and the Shiite jihadists of Iran’s Islamic Republic. There is no viable center. We abandoned it. The Obama administration’s unilateral pullout created a vacuum for the entry of the worst of the worst. And the damage was self-inflicted. The current situation in Iraq, says David Petraeus, “is tragic foremost because it didn’t have to turn out this way. The hard-earned progress of the surge was sustained for over three years.” Do the math. That’s 2009 through 2011, the first three Obama years. And then came the unraveling. When? The last U.S. troops left Iraq on Dec. 18, 2011. Want to do retrospective hypotheticals? Start there.
Charles Krauthammer’s email address is letters@ charleskrauthammer.com.