When news editors are more interested in ideological and commercial interests than in reporting the news

How the mighty are fallen.  From WaPo seems to want to write about the heat — but you can't elevate the heat story over the smoke story. by Ann Althouse.   She uses the following illustration.

Her point is that there is an editorial failure here trying to merge two unrelated stories.  The first story is a dog-bites-man story, i.e. it is hot in the summer and it is especially hot in the South in the summer compared to other states.  But, crucially, not yet apparently hotter than any normal summer.

And the other story is of the effect of the forest fires in Canada on some of our northern states which have been going on for two months.

So, one story that is not new news (Canadian fires) and another story which is not news at all (it is hot in the summer) and neither story related or relevant to one another.  From Althouse:

These stories are not connected, but they are put together, I suspect, to intensify concern about long-term global warming, which, to me — living where the air quality index is 270 at the moment — feels like a failure to take the smoke problem seriously. It's often hot in the summer in the south! This smoke is something I have never seen in my life. It's actively unhealthy for millions of Americans. After staying home for years hiding from a virus, I am now hiding from the air. On Twitter, I'm seeing conspiracy theories. The mainstream media treating this problem as a phenomenon on the level of 100° temperatures in Texas in the summer is going to make some of us paranoid.

Bad editing is abusive to empirical observation, disrespectful of readers, and verging on propaganda.  It is made worse by the natural assumption that the Washington Post editors are trying to manufacture news to advance an ideological and commercial interest, i.e. AGW.  The normal summer weather is unrelated to global warming and the Canadian forest fires are unrelated to global warming and both are unrelated to each other.

But for the Washington Post editors, it seems, if you sling enough dung against the wall, there will be enough of a pattern to write about.  

Althouse is obviously correct when she points out that elevating normal summer weather to an equivalence with a relatively rare event such as the massive Canadian forest fires is an editorial failure which disrespects those readers who are actually suffering the consequences of the forest fire.

Seems to me like it is a more complete and abject failure than simply not maintaining and editorial sense of perspective.  Seems like an Editorial team who can no longer effectively report news because they are primarily concerned about advancing ideological and commercial interests.