Newsflush

Yesterday I read the least informative sentence I've ever seen in the pages of The New York Times, in an article on the purported effects of a decline in reading by people:

The data also showed that students who read for fun nearly every day performed better on reading tests than those who reported reading never or hardly at all.

I can't blame this all on the writer, since the story merely paraphrases a report that apparently spends 99 pages stating the obvious. But there's still no excuse for failing to provide a perspective on the report's findings. I mean, why waste the paper?