No news is good news, at least as far as the Sun is concerned. The lead story, "Pataki, TV Brass Due to Wrestle Over an Antenna," is not only not news, but misleading as well. At issue is the possibility of replacing the WTC television antennas with a new tower on Governor's Island, one of several possible sites (as we learn at the very end of the piece). Nothing has happened as of yet; the only news is that representatives of the broadcasting industry will meet with Gov. George Pataki on April 29 to discuss the plan.

But worse, the paper makes it sound as if a grand debate over the future of New York media is at hand (Mayor Mike Bloomberg's office wants to put a new CUNY campus on the site). But read into it a bit, and you'll find that a) only a handful of New Yorkers are actually affected by the absence of a tower, b) that the Sun was unable to get a statement one way or the other from Pataki's office and c) that there's no reason both facilities can't fit on the island. While there may be a story here somewhere, it's a little puzzling as to why it deserved an all-caps, big-font headline in the in the Sun's prime front-page real estate.

While the antenna story is simply not news, the story below it — "Jackson Wants Piece of WTC" — is not journalism. It discusses a speech by Rev. Jesse Jackson at the WTC site in which he called for more minority involvement in the rebuilding efforts. But the lede, worth quoting in full, makes it sound as if Jackson was calling for a quota system in contracting bids: "As if the web of interest groups battling over the World Trade Center isn't complicated enough, now look who's looking for a piece of the action: None other than the Rev. Jesse L. Jackson." Aside from calling New York's minorities "interest groups," the piece accuses Jackson of calling on the city to make it a "priority to give minority- and women-owned firms contracts." But the piece never quotes Rev. Jackson's speech, and there's no evidence that the reporter, Anna Schneider-Mayerson, was actually at the event (which included, we learn later, 15 other speakers, who addressed a brace of other WTC-related issues). Instead, the front-page portion's sole quotation is from Kenneth Timmerman, a well-known Jackson critic (who, by the way, was not at the speech and doesn't seem to have known anything about it).

The standard of fairness at the Sun seems to call for outrageously biased lede paragraphs combined with material further down the column directly contradicting them. Jackson's sole quotation, caught as he left his office, has him saying simply that minorities and women "should be involved in the rebuilding effort. 'This does not come at the expense of quality,' he volunteered." A damning statement, to be sure, but the article goes on to quote several people who affirm that, indeed, there is a lack of minority-owned businesses involved in the rebuilding process. Executive Director of the Manhattan Chamber of Commerce Nancy Ploeger told the paper that "We know that there's a real disparity — every city agency needs to be hit over the head with it." Suddenly, Rev. Jackson sounds not only reasonable, but fully justified. If this is quality news, I can't wait to see what the Sun would look like if it started to slip.