The other day we saw how USA Today, in keeping with its charter as a very very serious national newspaper of national import, offered readers not-one-not-two-but-three hard-hitting stories on the prevous evening’s edition of “American Idol.”

We’re using “hard-hitting” in the USA Today sense, meaning “largely promotional, fluffy, and unquestioning.”

Today, the NYT takes a look at “Idol,” and quickly reveals that virtually everything on the show is scripted, right down to guys in the front making sure the sweet young things the show recruits to fill up the space in front of the stage* sway their arms in the air the right way during power ballads.

The sweet young things, incidentally, are bussed in from sororities.

Also, parts of the show billed as live aren’t, like a lot of the celebrity guest performances.

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* The Times, with an apparent straight face, calls this the “mosh pit.”

… in case you were wondering. Folks there still chafe when it gets dismissed as, you know, a comfortingly little daily piece of fluff that tries not to challenge the conceptions of the people it considers its audience.

Still American Idol is a big deal, so there’s nothing wrong with the paper doing a little story about it, right? Not the best story, mind you, but if you care, intrepid reporter Brian Mansfield is on the beat! The headline of the article—on the cover of today’s “Life” section—is “A ticket home can be theirs for the price of a song,” which makes no sense. The story is about how the choice of song can have an effect on how the Idol contestants do. (The hed was trying to say that a bad song choice can get you bounced off the program; it’s different on the web site.)

Anyway, the story is virtually reporting free; we learn that the show gives contestants a list of songs to choose from, but not who chooses the songs or why there’s a list… and we also learn that sometimes contestants go off the list, but then you wonder how they do that—doesn’t the show have to provide backing music and an arrangement?

And we also hear how certain songs sink certain contestants, but we never learn why!

Questions, questions.

Anyway, even a dumb, non-reported story on a silly TV show is well within the purview of a serious operation like USA Today.

But then… there’s a second story on American Idol, as well, by Ken Barnes, under the rubric “News & Views,” also on the cover of the “Life” section.

In this little piece Barnes discusses how the singers on the show the night before all had to sing Mariah Carey songs, though neither the article nor the hedline made it clear that this story was about American Idol as well. You were just expected to know, I guess.

Anyway, once you got off the front page of the section you could breath a sigh of relief, until… you were confronted with page three, which featured a regular column, “Idol Spotlight,” in which another intrepid reporter, Andrew McGinn, goes back to tell us where contestants from Idols past are now!

That story was illustrated by a picture of a special magazine-style edition of the USA Today “Life” section, devoted to American Idol, which the blurb helpfully told us could be found at our local store or by calling an 800 number.

Incidentally, the USA Today web site, beside sucking in all the ways you’d expect (for example: on some but not all interior pages, like this one, the paper’s logo doesn’t link back to the home page), bears a lot of evidence of some of the weird phenomena surrounding newspaper web sites. For one, if you search for “American Idol,” you don’t get any of the three stories I just mentioned. It takes a while to realize the site had generated five more Idol stories in the six or seven hours since the paper was published, so you have to click on the more button to get to the ones that were in that day’s paper.

Once you do, you still can’t find Ken Barnes’ take; I pondered this puzzle for a while and finally decided it was because Barnes over the course of his “News & Views” never actually mentioned the words “American Idol” in his piece. (Silly me, I was trying to find a story about a TV show written by the paper’s TV critic by searching for the name of the show and the name of the critic.) But he did refer to “Idol” in passing, so I searched for “barnes idol” but that didn’t produce anything either. So I went after the name of one of the contestants he mentioned and finally found it.

Oddly enough, on the web site, the piece was hedlined “Idol recap,” which helpfully told readers that it was, you know, a recap of American Idol, which the very-high-level editors of the paper proper didn’t bother to do.

By the way, while digging up the links on the above I noticed this on the USA Today home page:

I’m not a big expert on the Catholic Church, but isn’t Benedict XVI the pope who just took the position in the last year or so? Does USA Today or the web site employ actual editors, or is it overseen by a bunch of chimpanzees?