The goings-on of the Dalton School newspaper are automatically New York Times-worthy, and not just because NYT editor Bill Keller is a Dalton dad. Private schools are simply inherently important, to journalism! Today: more journalistic drama—at Dalton!

Dalton is only the most important private school for the most important people in Manhattan, for those of you who don't know (poors). Even Supreme Court justices cower in fear of the Dalton school newspaper, okay? So anyhow, The Daltonian had a front page story coming out about how 80% of Dalton kids don't drink "regularly." But the school confiscated the paper and changed the story to make sure it indicated correctly that 80% of Dalton kids don't drink at all.

Who gives a shit, right? Why must we endlessly hear of the generic travails of these damn private schools and their school papers, which, like all school papers, are boring? Because:

More than 25 years ago, officials at the Brearley School, led by the headmistress, Evelyn J. Halpert, tried to quash the publication of a poll on drug use in the school's underground magazine, Samizdat...

The crude publication, not much more than stapled 8-by-11-inch sheets, said that around 40 percent of the senior class had tried marijuana, according to one of its founders, Katie Roiphe, now a professor of journalism at New York University.

The kids on the Dalton paper now will be running all the fancy news outlets 25 years from now, and they'll naturally be interested in what's going on back at the old school. It's a self-perpetuating cycle of self-fascination. And meanwhile the public school kids probably can't even read.

[NYT]