Boy does the Arizona Republic suck at editing. I mean, it’s hard to believe there is something other than a big ol’ desk of chimpanzees reading copy before it’s printed.

Consider a story today about what the average per-employee cost of city government is.

The story begins like this:

Phoenix Councilman Sal DiCiccio says that the average city employee costs taxpayers about $100,000 in salary and benefits. Councilman Michael Nowakowski says the average worker earns much less. Who’s right?

Both are.

Boy, it sure sounds like we’re going to get two accounts of the issues involved, with the reporter noting that it all comes down to how you massage the figures.

But it turns out … DiCiccio’s basically right. No, not even basically right. The average annual cost per employee is just shy of $98,000, period.

The story goes on for seven more paragraphs, discussing a few ancillary issues, but never challenges the figure.

Nowakowski never returns to make a different case!

Secondly, in the lede, we see a reference to “salary and benefits.” But then we see Nowakowski saying they “earn” much less.

The editor of the story could have asked the reporter to clarify this distinction. The paper could have explained that the “benefits” part of the equation is a lot—forty or fifty percent more than the base salary the employees “earn.”

So the average salary of city employees might be just $65K.

Next, the only real comparison at issue in this debate is what the costs of Phoenix are relative to other major cities. The story discusses utterly irrelevant matters like the average cost of private sector employees ($54K a year)

… with, of course, no attempt to make the case that the two labor forces are in any way comparable.

(You’d assume, in fact, that they would be much different. A big city would be most comparable to a single large corporation doing specialized highly professional and bureaucratic work.

(You gotta figure that the percentage of the work force doing low-paying basic service-industry jobs would be much, much higher in the private sector.)

We all know we have a government that pays people.

It’s an entirely fair question to ask whether Phoenix pays its employees more than other large cities.

But why does a newspaper waste the time of everyone involved by reporting on everything but the one metric that would answer the question at hand?

Doesn’t the Arizona Republic have editors?