Besides mowing lawns and shoveling snow, my very first job as a lad was an Omaha World-Herald newspaper route. I delivered the paper every day to about 40 customers in the south end of Council Bluffs, Iowa. That’s why the headline that Warren Buffett has purchased the OWH attracted my attention.

The price, reportedly, is $150 million plus the assumption of $50 million of debt. Two-hundred-thousand bucks for a business that Buffett once told his shareholders has a “potential for unending losses.” The biggest problems newspapers face are 24-hour cable news outlets and Internet news websites. They have drawn readers away from newspapers causing many of them to close or to operate at a deficit.

It is my hope that Buffett’s bet on the future of the newspaper is a winner. Not because he needs any more money, but because citizens in a free society need good journalism. Buffett said there are many things newspapers can do “better than any other media.” He’s right about that. Here are two things newspapers do better: reach a local audience and explain the news with context and gravity.

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Yesterday’s story on the “Cry Wolf” project has exposed a dangerous pretense that has been prevalent, yet well disguised, for some time in our institutions of higher learning. It’s an important post.  A small committee of professors and academic professionals, normally held in high regard, have blatantly betrayed the trust of the public and quite possibly smeared the reputations of all colleges and universities nationwide.  By soliciting “paid activists” to create research papers that are intentionally designed to silence opposing viewpoints, they have undermined the political system and manipulated the governmental policy making process.  And in the meantime, they’ve also implicated all of academia in the manufacturing of their propaganda.

It is an abuse of their power, and an abuse of the institutions they represent.  It is appalling and repellent.  Perhaps even against their employers’ rules or the industry’s ethical code. Consider it an ominous warning — this will have a dire impact on our political and economic system in the future, if we remain apathetic in the face of such a rhetorical and intellectual assault.

In fact, both the rhetoric and the intentions demonstrated in Peter Dreier’s email are a classic example of much of what is wrong with today’s educational institutions: hypocrisy, bias, recklessness, and a blatant disregard for differing beliefs and viewpoints.

As Americans, we place an enormous amount of pride in the quality of our nation’s system of higher education.  In our country, colleges and universities have long been the bastions of research, the sources to which we turn for information that is expertly developed; for data that is honestly mined, analyzed, reviewed and responsibly published by noted researchers so that individuals, business people and policy makers can make well-informed decisions.

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