This just in -- Houston-Today.com sucks

I might have referred you several times over the last weeks to the online site of a little newspaper in British Columbia called Houston-Today.com, but after an editorial appearing there this morning, i'm thinking perhaps I won't bother anymore. It is an unsigned opinion piece, which I take to mean a piece written by the editorial staff at the paper, and therefore a statement of the paper's general attitude. The piece is shot through with sarcasm, mocking their readers. It begins by scoffing at the interests of its own readers, saying "Apparently the world doesn’t care if a watchdog group is slinging arrows at the District, or rental rates may be hiked at community facilities. But write one dang bigfoot story and all hell breaks loose." This complaint is lodged because their story about the Buck Flats Road sighting was the most popular story for several weeks.

This complaint is ugly on its face, and misguided for two reasons. First, let's be clear -- mocking reader preferences, as if the editors of the paper are somehow better than their readers because of the preferences they have, is appalling. That's a moral ugliness that makes you wonder whether you really care what these guys think and write? But lets look at two reasons why the comparison they have used is absurd anyway. First, people don't need to be reminded about how their government and other social institutions suck. We are reminded of this fact daily. So it should come as no surprise that stories about how much our institutions suck are not exactly popular.

But it's really fundamentally unfair for the editors to make the comparison anyway -- and this is point number two: the story of the bigfoot sighting had an international audience. I would feel confident in asserting that most of the people who read the bigfoot story do not even live in British Columbia and could not be expected to care about the local situation there. This should have been obvious to the editors, but they still felt the need to insult their own readers about their concerns and civic mindedness as if these international readers didn't exist.

In an article in which the editors might well have celebrated their own brief relevance to a wider audience, they chose instead to kick the home base. If you believe I'm making this up, or perhaps taking it to extremes, consider how they closed the article -- with a sneering call to turn this into some kind of tourist attraction, as if the only benefit from considering whether people are interested in a cryptozoological creature would be that it could be monetized, and in the process of this slur, subtly impugning the motives of their own UFO/bigfoot researcher Brian Vike:

We wouldn’t be the first to be a little eclectic to pique the curiousity of travelling tourists. St. Paul, Alberta has its UFO landing pad, Kelowna has Ogopogo, Stewiacke, Nova Scotia has its mastadon and Glover’s Harbour, Nfld., has its giant killer squid.

While the giant fly rod is of special pride, maybe there might be something to appealing to the curious.

Over the past decade, Houston’s Brian Vike has made quite a name for himself internationally as a UFO researcher.

Again, whether you believe it or not, is a moot point.

As just that little story in our little newspaper proved, there are those out there who do believe.

Who are we to tell them they are wrong? After all, they eat food, sleep in hotels, buy souvenirs, just like the rest of us.

Let's break this down. First, I haven't run across any evidence that Brian Vike is looking to make a name for himself. He isn't, for instance, holding breathless press conferences claiming to have evidence he does not in fact have. He's collecting information and dispensing it to people who are interested in it. Much like newspapers do. Well dern me I just had a thought -- is it possible that, maybe, somebody is getting a little jealous because a non-newspaper guy found something people are really interested in right now? This is the kind of thing that makes you want to kick it. So I am kicking it, and I don't think I've kicked hard enough yet.

Because the last bit -- after having mocked the entire thing, from the interest of the readers to the motives of the researcher, now the editors come to say cynically -- "But hey, we could make money off of this!" Perhaps they would like to claim that this is satire, but coming after the bad faith exhibited in the rest of the piece, I'll excuse you if you don't believe that it is. We can keep it just between ourselves.

So here's what I say: Screw these guys. They have shown that they don't give a flying flip about their readers, in fact that they have a "holier than thou" attitude toward them, and that the only benefit they can see from their readers' curiosity is how much money you can make off of the suckers. Now I must ask you, who would bother to read such people? Not me. The next time there is any bigfoot news from British Columbia, I think I'll stick with Brian Vike's reporting at the HBCC.

You may now return to your regularly scheduled bigfooting.