Reports indicate that the temperature in Hades is 30 degrees and dropping. The Glens Falls Post-Star actually did an article on one of the three non-Republican candidates to become the city's next mayor... one they'd ignored entirely up until today.
I'll pause for a second to let you recover from your shock.
This brings up to, by my count, four the number of articles Our 'Hometown Daily' has bothered to do in the last nine months on the non-GOP aspirants Bill Berg, Esmond Lyons and LeRoy Akins. They have run at least two dozen articles on Republicans Bud Taylor and Peter McDevitt.
I was almost giddy about this until I actually read the piece. The article they ran today wasn't particularly flattering of Berg as it focused primarily on his battles with his former employer the Fire Department and personal problems.
Bud Taylor is the only candidate allowed to receive flattering portraits by The Post-Star; even most of the paper's articles on McDevitt have been largely negative. So Berg couldn't have been surprised, even if his sales' pitch seems to be in desperate need of work.
The paper would likely say that they only gave blanket coverage to Taylor and McDevitt because they were competing against each other in the Republican and Conservative party primaries.
In fact, their Boos and Bravos editorial even gave a slap on the wrist to the Glens Falls Labor Council and Informed Constituent newspaper for sponsoring a general election debate before the primary election: 'ill-conceived and ill-timed,' lectured the daily.
It seems The Post-Star doesn't approve of candidates campaigning before the primary election if they are their party's uncontested nominee. The debate may have caused 'confusion,' warned The Post-Star.
Apparently after 200+ years of our democracy, citizens aren't savvy enough to know the difference between a general election and a primary election. Are those who attended the debate worse off for knowing the positions of those who weren't in the next day's primary? It's a ludricrous assertion.
This is an extremely weak reason to all but completely ignore three candidates for nine months while giving saturation coverage to the other two. I don't recall them foregoing coverage of President Bush (who got the 2004 national GOP nomination unopposed) during the contested Democratic primaries.
Perhaps this is just a token piece on Bill Berg so they can wash their hands of criticism and say they've run at least one article on all the candidates... even if it's been exactly one for Berg and Lyons and only two for Akins.
Granted, this still doesn't change the fact that not only has the daily annointed Bud Taylor as mayor-select, but they've even transfered that bias into their news articles... which they pass off as objective information.
I'd like to give them the benefit of the doubt, but the supply of that is being quickly exhausted. What editorial rationale justified running homey portraits of Taylor, McDevitt and Akins (but not Lyons) earlier in the year while allowing their first and, so far only, purported news article on Berg to be extremely critical? Where is the piece on Lyons where they get his wife, best friend and family dog to talk about what a wonderful man he is?
This article perpetuates the paper's track record of running fluff pieces only on Taylor (except for the portraits of Akins and McDevitt) while being critical of all the other candidates... when they condescend to mention the other candidates at all.
It would be nice if the paper decided to serve the interests of their readers (consumers) who want to be informed about all of the mayoral candidates. Perhaps they might decide to balance out nine months of blanket coverage of Taylor and McDevitt with a month and a half of blanket coverage of Lyons, Berg and Akins... or even a non-hatchet job on McDevitt. Just so they might approximate fairness.
I can certainly fantasize about living in a city where the primary media outlet's management decides that fully informing the public is a duty they take seriously. But I'm not holding my breath.
When interviewed by a journalist for the paper about this blog, I was asked something like, "Do [I] enjoy the chance to take potshots at the paper?"
It was phrased in such a way that suggested I was a little kid who enjoyed throwing stones at the big boys.
The answer is no, not really. I don't squeal in delight everytime I chastize The Post-Star for some alleged transgression. Criticizing our 'Hometown Daily' is not more satisfying to me than an orgasm or the Red Sox winning the World Series. It's not as though I'd have a lack of things to comment on nationally or internationally if The Post-Star became a good paper again. In fact, I hardly ever wrote about the paper until recently, when I realized that I actually had a few local readers.
I don't enjoy criticizing the paper. I would much rather it be a beacon of journalistic brilliance. I would settle for it being the pretty darn good paper it was 5 or 10 years ago. I used to rave about how good The Post-Star was for such a relatively small (in population) area. I'd been to much larger cities who had far inferior newspapers.
The paper's dumbing down process started a few years ago has made it a cariciature of its once excellent self. I realize that no paper is going to have 100 percent reader agreement with every editorial decision it takes; a product that achieve that goal isn't a news publication but an echo chamber. A mainstream paper's credibility is based not on unanimity but a general appreciation for its attempts to be thorough, intelligent, serious and fair. The Post-Star is quickly losing that battle on all fronts, not just in political coverage.
So while I don't enjoy taking potshots at the paper, I also realize that self-appointed watchdogs rarely appreciate anyone watching them. Perhaps they don't think anyone notices things like their skewed coverage of the Glens Falls' mayor's race and then generalized dumbing-down but a lot of people do. And while they would surely dismiss my observations (if they even considered them) as the whining of a partisan, they ignore these legitimate criticisms at their own risk. They are a business, after all. A business with consumers. A business with consumers who have other ways of getting information. While most prefer the convenience of The Post-Star's information, many might decide that hard-hitting front page articles like that about a bridge in Scotland that dogs like to jump off (Aug. 4, 2005) do not serve them well as citizens of upstate New York.
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