Writer for Post speaks

Cindy Skrzycki knows what makes a good slice of Swiss cheese.

Large holes render the… Cindy Skrzycki knows what makes a good slice of Swiss cheese.

Large holes render the cheese flimsy and ill-suited for a sandwich, while Swiss cheese without uniformly sized holes makes a slice visually unappealing.

She has also said that there are 22 possible classifications for Swiss cheese, based on the size of holes and the overall character of the cheese.

Skrzycki is a connoisseur — of federal regulations.

Skrzycki, a journalist-in-residence in Pitt’s English department, writes a weekly column on Swiss cheese and a host of other issues for The Washington Post. She spoke to a small audience in the Cathedral of Learning on Tuesday night about what she described as “a governmental function that’s been around in one form or another since the beginning of the Republic.”

Her anecdote about Swiss cheese represents what she called a more “entertaining” example of federal regulation and was one that she included in her recent book, “The Regulators: Anonymous Power Brokers in American Politics.”

“I opened the book with it because I wanted students to understand that nothing is off-limits,” she said.

A common link between airports, pollution, cars, and yes, Swiss cheese, is the federal government’s unique brand of bureaucratic rulemaking. Regulators, after no shortage of deliberations, set guidelines for holes in Grade A Swiss cheese at three-eighths to three-sixteenths of an inch.

Regulators were recently in the news with the Federal Communications Commission’s investigation of singer Janet Jackson’s revealing Super Bowl halftime performance.

Skrzycki discussed the FCC’s application of obscenity standards, including its ban of “seven objectionable words.” According to her, one man at the FCC spends a considerable amount of time listening to tapes of Howard Stern’s popular morning radio show.

Politically, regulation is often an instinctual response to crisis. In the wake of corporate scandals such as the collapse of Enron, Skrzycki noted that many called for more vigilant regulation and stronger laws to be used by regulators.

And there are cases of less glamorous regulation, which tend to elude the political radar screen. One man, whom Skrzycki met, had the job of tea-taster, a task that consisted solely of tasting teas and classifying them as green, oolong or pekoe. The man, an employee of the federal government for more than 50 years, favored the “taste and spit” method.

For Skrzycki, knowing her beat means research, albeit research that is not as specialized as that of the tea-taster.

“Every week is like a term paper,” she said. “You have a topic that really needs to be researched thoroughly before you can approach it.”

In the fall semester, Skrzycki plans to teach an Honors College course on the history of journalism. Teaching shouldn’t be much of a stretch for Skrzycki, who spends much of her time in an informative role, writing about a cadre of bureaucrats with whom most readers have little familiarity. It’s a role that clearly fascinates her.

“These people run the government,” she said of the regulators. “They aren’t elected. They make a lot of decisions we don’t ask them to make.”