TCU360, the online publication Texas Christian University, published an interesting story in today’s edition, seeing as how it comes in the midst of a highly overblown drug bust.
“Study Says Alcohol No. 1 Substance For Abuse” by reporter Kaileigh Kurtain (cool byline!) describes how college students prefer booze. And since most of them are under 21, that would mean — gasp! — illegal consumption of alcohol is rampant on campus.
I doubt we’ll hear much about that. Why? Because college kids drinking beer isn’t all that newsworthy. Busting smalltime pot dealers selling quarter ounces of weed here and there isn’t all that newsworthy either, even if a few were football players.
Fort Worth Star-Telegram‘s breathless coverage makes you think Tony Montana and his goon squad were walking around campus with machine guns saying, “Make way for the bad guy.” The newspaper has literally printed about 20 stories from every conceivable angle this week about college kids smoking weed.
left right left right left left right!
tell the truth and keep on telling it!
Kaileigh Kurtain? That is a cool name!
“…head in a cookie jar…” Ahhhhh!
I agree wholeheartedly with everything you wrote, Jeff.
I can walk across the street and legally buy (legally? hell, the state gets a big cut) two of the most dangerous, addictive, and destructive drugs known to humanity: nicotine and ethanol. But a natural, unprocessed plant in the grass family which I can grow in my own back yard? Call the cops!
And if 15 or 20 people had been busted in Stop Six for selling a few pills of some weed, would the S-T have basically published a special section on it?
Oh, that’s right. Rich kids, TCU, many of them white: no wonder it called for such ponderous coverage. What next? Another missing white woman in Aruba?
The alcohol consumption at TCU doesn’t bother me, and the Star-Telegram story about students getting arrested for selling grass doesn’t bother me because, yes, kids are going to be kids. But this does bother me: I just learned that Mac Engel teaches a course at TCU. Surely he couldn’t teach writing or journalism. Does TCU offer a course in ping-pong?