What you like is in the limo…

I haven’t previously heard this mix of “Fame,” but I’m really posting to to give me an excuse to write about a weird obsession of my local newspaper, Albany’s Times Union. A terrible accident happened back in 2018 in which a poorly maintained limousine crashed, killing 20 people. The incident occurred in Schoharie County, which is a rural county outside what I think of as New York’s Capitol region, but close enough to be covered by the Times Union. In writing this, I don’t mean to make light of an obviously horrendous tragedy, but the paper’s coverage of the crash and its aftermath has approached “Panda Watch” territory.

There is a limo story in the paper nearly every day. I have been sending my wife screenshots of the daily story and over the past week, I think Sunday was the only day without a story to send. I’m not sending the screenshots because the daily developments, five years after the calamity, are keeping me on the edge of my seat. Rather, the typical story is some version of “nothing happened today.” A committee didn’t meet, a motion was denied in court, someone expresses regret that nothing happened. In the abstract, I can get behind the idea of not letting an unresolved issue just fade away, but it’s like the TU has nothing else to do. I used to run into the Albany County executive, Dan McCoy from time to time, and would say to him, “you must not be doing anything.” The first couple of times I’d say this his back would arch and he’d ask, defensively, “what do you mean?” I’d reply that I never read about him in the Times Union. At that point he’d get the joke and chuckle. The point is that there’s a lot going on the the area covered by the paper, which is geographically extensive. There’s limited space in the paper and there are only so many reporters on the paper’s staff. It isn’t that the limo crash isn’t a legitimate story, its just that there are other legitimate stories that the paper is overlooking.

This isn’t new for the TU. In the past, it latched on to ongoing narratives anbout ann infamous murder (Christopher Porco), ballot fraud in Troy (Mike LoPorto), and a sex/executives training cult (NXIVM). Each of these stories were newsworthy for sure, but the paper’s relentless coverage of every minuscule development, or lack thereof, seemed more a product of laziness than in-depths investigation.

What does any of this have to do with David Bowie? Nothing, other than there are enough Bowie songs for me to have an excuse to rant about just about anything. And I’m guessing you, too haven’t heard this mix of “Fame” before…