DATE: Sunday, July 27, 1997                 TAG: 9707250016

SECTION: COMMENTARY              PAGE: J5   EDITION: FINAL 

SOURCE: LYNN FEIGENBAUM

                                            LENGTH:   92 lines

REPORT TO READERS HOT BUTTONS FROM DOG DAYS OF JULY

Kennel owners dogged us this week. They were unhappy with Tuesday's Hampton Roads story, ``When owners go away, kennels try to help pets feel at home.''

The headline certainly sounds positive. And the photo showed a veterinary assistant giving caring attention to a canine boarder.

But the story was loaded with phrases that made it sound like boarded animals stay in a penitentiary rather than a pen. Those phrases included ``a stay in the pet pokey,'' ``each pooch passes cell time differently'' and ``Blackie and Rex went upriver for a stay in the hoosegow.''

Kathie Vogel, who runs the Hunt Club Kennel in Virginia Beach, was not amused. Although her kennel wasn't mentioned, she was ``extremely offended'' and felt the story reflected poorly on all kennels.

``If you were a pet owner,'' she asked, ``would you put your animal in a kennel after reading this story?''

Vogel said the Hunt Club doesn't have ``cells'' but floor-to-ceiling runs with heated flooring for the winter and air conditioning in the summer. At least three other kennels in the area offer the same resources, she said.

Sam Henkle, owner of Sterling Meadows Kennel in Virginia Beach, was also annoyed.

``We take very high pride in taking very good care of the animals,'' he said, ``and making sure every one of them is taken care of properly and not just caged and stuffed away.''

I think the reporter was just having fun with a light-hearted, summertime story. Even writing this item, I can't resist my own canine puns. But humor can get overdone and, in the kennel story, it might have been curbed a bit.

VACATION VACUUM. How do you know it's vacation time? For one, you'll find stranger-than-usual glitches in the newspaper. One of those was on Tuesday's editorial page, an Another View column headlined, ``National tests require a national curriculum.''

The column was written by Michael Farris, president of the Home School Legal Defense Association, but he probably wouldn't have recognized it in print. It had more than a dozen blatant errors - missing words, noun-verb mismatches, typos and duplicated phrases. Particularly embarrassing, considering that the subject was education.

``I can't remember the last time I read an article with so many grammatical errors,'' wrote Valerie Keel of Chesapeake, ``and I find it very hard to believe that that's the way Mr. Farris submitted his letter. Someone needs to apologize to him - and be a whole lot more careful in the future.''

She's right. It was not the way Farris submitted his column, and we do need to be more careful. As a correction Wednesday noted, the errors were the newspaper's fault. The lapses began with poor typing and ended with no one proofreading the column, the result of two editorial department editors being on vacation and the others thinking someone else had checked it over.

As always, a few readers were convinced a conspiracy was afoot - that the newspaper was deliberately undermining a conservative opinion. ``You need some proofreaders really bad, you bunch of dumb socialist $(CT)%$(NU)!*,'' said one man.

Well, he's right about the proofreaders. You'll find Michael Farris' column repeated today on this page, hopefully unblemished.

CATHOLIC BASHING. There's been little reaction to coverage of Andrew Cunanan, which played out to its ultimate tragic end this week on a Miami Beach houseboat.

But one reader raised an interesting objection to Monday's story about the suspected killer of designer Gianni Versace, who was still on the loose.

The wire report ran on the front page, headlined ``A new kind of killer?'' and accompanied by a half-dozen photos from the FBI's most-wanted file.

The story's second paragraph described the 27-year-old Cunanan as a ``Catholic altar boy and prep-school graduate turned `gigolo' and `party boy' and now suspected in five murders in four states.''

Our caller, who identified herself only as a Catholic woman, said the press is always maligning that religion. You would never see someone described as a Baptist murderer or Lutheran murderer or Methodist murderer, she said.

So if we're going to write about Catholic murderers, she concluded, we should do it for all religions.

By coincidence, I saw the movie ``Sleepers'' this week, about four young boys growing up in the New York section once aptly known as Hell's Kitchen. The contrast between them as troublemakers and altar boys recurs throughout the movie.

I thought it was something of a cliche in the movie, and probably a cliche in our real-life story. Our caller had a point. Cunanan's religion was out of place in that story.

DILBERT'' DILLY. Mike Burke wanted to know if we censor our comics. Why? Because, in the July 17 ``Dilbert,'' which runs in the Business section, part of the dialogue reads: ``Yeah. It might have been useless.'' In The Washington Post, the same panel says, ``Yeah. It might have sucked.''

But, no, we did not white out the s-word and replace it with ``useless.'' United Features Syndicate gave newspapers two versions of the strip and let them choose. Pilot editors opted for the milder version.

I guess that says something about the differences between local and D.C. audiences.

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