Pearls Before Swine by Stephan Pastis for February 17, 2025

If a city needs more reporters, Musk can send some teenagers who are almost as qualified as the teenagers he put in charge of the US government.

Makes me wonder who the greater hero is—Superman or Clark Kent.

We have newspapers and TV station’s reporters here, how they report may br different!

How many are needed? Perhaps we just need reporters who aren’t shills for government.

Don’t go to the orange dungs press conference and mention the Gulf of Mexico

All my thoughts are post-ironic, I never know if I’m actually feeling anything anymore

We used to have a government policy called “The Fairness Doctrine.” It kept anyone company from owning more than one TV station in any town. One of the first things Ronald Reagan did as President was start the dismantle it.

The❤️Count … Rat … Simpatico Again. God Bless America (no sarcasm there, boy howdy)

Yep and Kilpatrick still owes the city of Detroit 8 million dollars. Rotten to the core.

Steph Thats one of your best and funniest!

Local news is always a better source.

It’s mostly because our cities are being run like the New York Jets: A complete dumpster fire.

The idea that cities are all horrible is propaganda spread by Republicans, who hate cities. Almost every city has bad areas and good areas. NYC, for example, is 59th in violent crime and 95th in overall crime. If it was so horrible, you wouldn’t have high housing costs and no vacancy. Same for San Francisco. If it was undesirable, it would be cheap. It’s not.

Anchorage, Tulsa, and Wichita have a serious crime problem, though.

It IS true that smaller cities often have a corruption problem because there’s no local reporting. I grew up in a smaller city near NYC. Had a huge reputation for corruption. Because it was pretty large but all the reporters were focused on NYC.

This strip might have worked better if it didn’t run the day after a CBS reporter said free speech = Nazism

HAPPY PRESIDENT TRUMP DAY….!!!!

Cities were in much worse condition when a typical city would have 3+ papers and everyone read at least one. Newspapers have always been totally biased in their reporting and few showed any concern about conditions in immigrant/minority ghettos-no advertsing $s.

Rat and Goat agreeing again.

Nobody elected the news media. It’s about $$. If reporters disappeared it’s because nobody paid for their drivel.

Only temporarily,I’m afraid.

I used to write a political satire column for a newspaper. People would always ask me how I came up with my crazy ideas. I’d tell ’em the truth. I attended the City Council meetings!

Just a reminder to the person who stated that Pastis never went political………………………ahem.

“No matter how cynical you get, it is impossible to keep up” -Lily Tomlin

So then the government will move faster than the media can keep up with their own agenda…

It keeps a lot of us from crying, Rat.

True Investigative Journalism died a long time ago or was bought off……

For that matter, do you think that there are very few reporters still covering city government because there are very few reporters, period?

More reporters don’t make a difference if they go along with whatever mistakes the government is making.

They’ll just raise your taxes and give the money to their cronies, including journalists who’ll say what a good job they’re doing

Boy, oh boy, Stephan Pastis is going in the right direction because he’s allowing another thing we find that connects RAT and GOAT for the apparent, but unlikely friendship that seems to be there….dan aka…ps thanks, Mr pastis!!!!!!!!

In “People’s Parties”, Joni Mitchell sang:

♪ " Laughing and crying, you know it’s the same release" ♪ .

You’re on a roll this week. Love it.

it’s so very, very sad

Poor condition mostly due to economics and bad management.

Well I did tell my friend Walter Cronkite, there will never be another you.

Buy your local paper so they can afford to hire reporters.

“Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.” —H. L. Mencken (1880-1956), American journalist, essayist, editor, and critic

Reading all the comments… “you can’t fight here, this is the war room.”

“If I had to choose between government without newspapers, and newspapers without government, I would not hesitate to choose the latter.” —Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826), 3rd US president

MORE qualified

Well, they could hardly do worse.

The problem has been that for the past 6 decades, the “reporters” covering city hall have fully supported the graft and corruption of the officials in city hall and have been covering for those officials. That’s why nobody believes those reporters anymore — they are in on it.

Our Founders made Freedom of the Press in our First Amendment for good reason. They opposed one source of information, especially if the only source is the government. This allows for each source to report as they choose to, with their own slant one way or another or down the middle. Fake news didn’t start there, but didn’t end there either. In particular, the election campaign between Adams and Jefferson was filled with lies, rumors and innuendo about both candidates, some pretty bad stuff. But our Founders, led by those two, believed that if we are to have self government, then we must determine the truth from the lies as well by making the effort. Just sitting in front of the tube awash in some talking head’s drivel is not making an effort. It’s not easy, separating the fly poop from the pepper, but if you want self government you gotta make that effort.

Big cities tend to vote Democrat, even in the Southern Red states, because Republican/conservatives have proved beyond reasonable doubt that they cannot govern and cannot manage an economy.

To all those still referring to Conservatives and supporters of Pres. Trump as Nazis: That worked really well for you in this past election, right? :-D

Amen, Rat…

Or slamming the door on your head repeatedly. After the second replacement, the landlord asked me to stop doing it.

Goat’s comment is blatantly idiotic. It basically ascribes the failings of urban governments to a simplistic, erroneous blame—which distracts from the fact that if the cities are in “poor condition” it’s actually due to the consistent mismanagement of the city government (usually a one-party monopoly over decades) in the first place, not a lack of journalists!!!!! It’s exactly like blaming police for a crime for not being present to prevent the criminals from committing the crime, instead of the criminals themselves!!!!

The only other way to look at this comment is that it infers that ANY government will automatically become corrupt as a default, UNLESS watched by self-appointed “watchdogs” calling themselves “journalists”—which tells you that we should avoid the use of government at all costs, no?

And who appoints and screens the “journalists”? As we’ve plainly seen over the decades, journalists and journalism are driven largely by promoting agendas, and get rewarded only for shamelessly pandering to their readership and viewership with biased coverage. If we are going to rely on “journalism” to “keep government honest” because we the citizenship itself can’t or won’t, then we definitely need BOTH leftist and rightist news—both Fox News AND MSNBC/CNN/CBS/ABC/NBC; both NPR and right-wing talk radio shows; etc. Indeed, we would probably need more right-wing news media sources just to compete with Fox for their market. And dump in a few libertarian and anarchist outlets just for good measure.

Could be worse. Could be the whole coun … oh, yeah.

Well, actually, government official and corporate employees both are equally honest :-)

oh man! Rat is on fire!!