There's a battle brewing over the rebuilding downtown, the Sun's Benjamin Smith tells us in today's lead story, "Culture Clash Emerges over World Trade Site." It pits white-shoe planners, such as architect Alexander Garvin and Deputy Mayor Daniel Doctoroff, against short-sleeve engineers and merchants. It's Ivy League versus City College. He's sure of it. Take his word for it. Just don't ask him to prove it.

After all, Smith went to Yale. So when he says "some of the city and state officials who deal with the matter" are "privately deriding the 'white men from Yale,' or WMFYs,' who are nominally steering the process," he should know. Never mind that none of his sources actually say "WMFY," let alone "White Men from Yale." Never mind that he doesn't have any sources who actually discuss a rift — nothing beyond an anonymous comment about "an interesting dynamic between Doctoroff and Garvin and the visionaries on one side and the meat-and-potatoes infrastructure people on the other." Never mind that "interesting dynamics" exist between husbands and wives, bosses and coworkers, even newspaper staffs, without being evidence of "culture clash." Never mind that all his named sources, from the LMDC Spokeswoman Nancy Poderycki to the Dean of the Yale School of Architecture Robert Stern, deny the existence of any conflict. It's there. Right?

Smith's piece is largely analogous to those standardized-test questions where you read a paragraph and pick the sentence that doesn't fit. Except here, most of them don't make any sense. Six lines, toward the very top of the story, talk about consultants applying for inclusion in land-use decisions. Not that these consultants are identified, or linked into the story in any way. Filler, perhaps? Smokescreen? Definitely. What's the real point of the story? Who knows, but given its shot-in-the-dark defense of Yalies (and why only Yale we can only guess), it comes across as little more than a limp pandering to like-minded uptown readers. After all, there's a lot in here about Garvin, his background and philosophy, but very little about his "opponent," the LMDC's Louis Tomson — except to say that Tomson is a long-time ally of Gov. George Pataki. A-ha.

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In an otherwise decent story about Mayor Mike Bloomberg's proposed restrictions on lawsuits against the city, Caleb Rabinowitz inexplicably writes about "the mayor's foray into 'tort reform' comes in reaction to damage costs." Seeing as how tort reform is neither a novel concept nor an abnormal phrase, Smarternysun wonders where exactly the paper's "editing staff" was when this "bit" came across their "desks."

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WIRE WATCH: Sliding from last week's high, today's Sun runs with only five original pieces out of 26 news stories. And we're being generous — one of those stories is about dogs competing to be on a reality-television program. (This piece, by Sarah Schmidt, also wins the Smarternysun's award for most tortured lede in a 12-page benighted daily: "Anyone who is naive enough to think that every conceivable type of social conflict has already been mined for reality television programming has obviously not been to a New York City dog run." Ugh.)