By Arthur Alpert

In the spirit of public service, I hereby alert the Albuquerque Journal’s bosses to a flaw in their system.

They’ve failed to monitor the regular, syndicated “Money & Markets” page (or monitor it with sufficient rigor) to edit out unacceptable content.

So ideas apt to raise questions about our system are getting through. Like the “Quotable” item on B5, Friday, April 1:

“When there’s pressure to cut costs in the United States, it’s borne by the workers. In Europe, it’s borne differently.”

That’s from Howard Rosen, “visiting fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, on why the U.S. is lagging other industrialized nations in job creation.”

Sounds reasonable. Plus, Germany needn’t create many jobs; having minimized layoffs, it’s recovering faster than we from the Great Recession.

Ooops! Shouldn’t have thought that. But it proves my point:

Rosen stirs doubt on the wisdom of American business practices. He hints that better solutions exist, too.

Worse yet, he locates them in Europe, well-known hotbed of socialism and incubator of countless other scourges – lengthy paid vacations, affordable health care and longer life spans.

Journal editors generally do a bang-up job screening out leftist propaganda, but not this time. And Rosen’s association with wealthy Wall Street conservative Pete Peterson provides no alibi; he could be a mole.

Bottom line, it’s the Journal’s mission to protect readers from dangerous doctrines whatever their source.

Mind you, the editors may be overworked. Consider the energy they expend finding ways – beyond the cockamamie headlines – to marginalize the paper’s token liberals. Gotta be exhausting.

And enforcing the “no fact-checking of local Op Ed essays” policy (treated here by Denise Tessier) must be very time-consuming.
Nevertheless, it’s time to address the flaw.

Eternal vigilance is the price of skewing the news for partisan ends.