One of my fellow OSers has a link up to an article on the WaPo's website that claims California is considering banning the sale of black cars.  Predictably, said OSer uses this article as an excuse to make one of his shrill and uninformed rants against the supposed tyranny of liberals.

The problem?  The article is damn near free of actual facts.   The writer wants to criticize a proposal by the Air Resources Board of the California EPA to force car manufacturers to use more reflective paint beginning in the model year 2012.  The idea is that cars will reflect instead of absorbing more heat, thereby reducing the need for drivers to blast the air conditioning the instant they start the vehicle, thus reducing the amount of fuel they use.

The report acknowledges that cars painted jet black will have trouble meeting the proposed standard.  The WaPo writer (actually a blogger from techcrunch.com, where the item was originally posted) extrapolates that California will thus ban black cars.  He then spends a couple of paragraphs ranting against the proposal purely on this basis.

What he neglects to mention is that this is one of literally dozens of proposals for reducing greenhouse gases the ARB has on its website.  It does not say that black cars will have to be banned.  It simply acknowledges that there is a problem, one I'm sure the auto manufacturers will heavily lobby over if this proposal even makes it to the state legislature.

The writer also links to a couple of other car blogs, neither of which really has anything to add to the story.  Just more bloggers (and their hundreds of commenters) metaphorically slapping their heads at the ridiculous ideas all us nuts in California manage to keep coming up with.

We keep hearing about newspapers going under because their audiences have migrated onto the web.  The Washington Post used to have at least some standards.  This is the paper of Woodward and Bernstein, for Chrissakes.  But here the WaPo is trying to remain relevant by using content from a blog, only the cotent is total bullshit that serves no purpose other than getting people riled up.  Meanwhile the paper looks bad for using it, thus ensuring that even more people will say the hell with traditional media outlets like the Washington Post.   

And it's partially the fault of us readers.  We don't educate ourselves, we don't discriminate between well-sourced journalism and pure crap that anyone with a modem can put out there.  It's said a society gets the politicians it deserves.  Our society these days is getting the  "journalism" it deserves.

UPDATE: The LA Times has a bit more here: http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/uptospeed/2009/03/black-car-ban.html