The Death of the Liberal Class foreshadowed our current collapse in social cohesion

Some years ago, I started reading but did not finish Chris Hedges' book The Death of the Liberal Class. (liberal of course meaning classical liberalism, not left-of-center politics)

Published in 2010, it described the collapse in credibility of the public institutions that long served as the foundation of western liberal democracy. This collapse has led to the comprehensive pan-ideological breakdown in social cohesion that we've experienced the last several years, which has been laid even more bare by the pandemic. 

This breakdown was accelerated by the Trump presidency, who exploited it mercilessly to get (s)elected in the first place. But the unraveling did not start with Trump's inauguration and will not end with his long overdue eviction from the White House. I think it's time I picked the book back up.

Why should you pay money for newspapers?

Glancing at a copy of The Post-Star in Stewart’s today, I got a good insight as to why the industry is struggling. 

Grand pooh-bahs like Ken Tingley, so eager to pat themselves on the back, intone that newspapers are still valuable because of one thing: editorial judgment. You can get news for free in countless places. But what distinguishes the newspaper from the “Internet” is editorial judgment. That vaunted editorial judgment of the paper allegedly ensures that’s what's published in a newspaper is not only accurate and verifiable but also relevant to its audience. Editorial judgment is why they charge you a dollar.

The editorial judgment of the local Post-Star deemed worthy of front page coverage four stories today. One was about whether 4/20 should be a legal holiday in Colorado. One was the Vatican welcoming an Easter crowd. And one was about the Zimbabwe regime seizing land.

This is what the paper’s leadership thought would be relevant enough to entice upstate New Yorkers to view their product as good value for money.

The only local story was about a historic clock in Saratoga Springs.

Suffice it to say, I did not view this as worth a dollar of my hard earned money.

County Counting: Accuracy (if not openness) Counts at PostStar.com

by contributor Mark Wilson

Part of a series on the troubles at The Post-Star and its parent company Lee Enterprises.


Glens Falls Post-Star Editor Ken Tingley is having difficulty with arithmetic again. On PostStar.com last week, his Front Page blog post titled "Showing you is different than telling you" referred to "all 58 counties in the state" (NY). The post appeared Thursday afternoon. A reader comment pointing out the error Friday morning was never posted, and yet by noontime the error disappeared without a trace, replaced by the correct number (click image to enlarge).

As has been mentioned before in this series, the Post-Star and Mr. Tingley have an on-again-off-again relationship with professional journalism standards, particularly where online content is concerned. The About Us page at PostStar.com still promotes the newspaper as a "twenty-nine-thousand circulation, daily newspaper" even though the newspaper’s daily circulation dropped well below that level in 2010 (yet the same page has updated the awards the paper and its employees have received at least through 2011).

Of course this is not the first time Mr. Tingley has made mistakes on his blogs. He most famously twice used the term "proof readers" in a post (and comments) scolding commenters and letter writers for lax grammar. This, though, is the first instance we know of where a factual mistake was corrected after the fact without acknowledgement.

The level of professional journalism to which Mr. Tingley aspires has a low tolerance for ethical corner cutting. In its section devoted to accountability, the Society of Professional Journalists’ Ethics Code states: Admit mistakes and correct them promptly.*

Treatment of online errors is not a new issue to the profession. The American Society of News Editors addressed the subject in 2001.

In 2008 the Columbia Missourian devoted an entire blog to the topic, complete with historical context and a common sense comprehensive policy statement. It also addresses how severely the credibility of news organizations is damaged by lack of candor and transparency.

Three years ago, a commentary at the Columbia Journalism Review referred to an article at MediaBugs.org that advanced another set of common sense standards for correcting factual errors in online content, many of which had already been widely adopted throughout the industry.

None of the best practices advanced by journalism’s ethical watchdogs condone the sort of surreptitious content scrubbing that happened last week at PostStar.com.

For a newspaper that sells itself as a model of professional integrity and has built a reputation for shining light on less than transparent operations in public offices, the honorable and consistent recourse would be for Mr. Tingley and the Post-Star to adopt a firm set of online correction standards and post them prominently at PostStar.com. And then, of course, adhere to them.

Failing that, here are a few handy poses Mr. Tingley might strike while defending or explaining future lapses, should the question of New York State counties arise again:
The Global/Universal Posture: Its so hard to count them when they keep moving around—the constant rotating on the earth’s axis, and revolving around the sun. . .and don’t get us started on the ever-accelerating expansion of the universe!
The Hyperlocal Posture: Our news coverage is so close-to-home that we don’t give a hoot how many counties lie outside our circulation radius!
The Nativist Posture: We refuse to acknowledge the existence of Oswego, Otsego, Otisco and Otasco Counties until they give themselves English names!
The Where’s Waldo Posture: Dude, for a moment there we thought we were living in California.
The Taught-to-the-Test Posture: 58 out of 62 is 93.5%. We still get an "A."

Of course, when all else fails, there’s always the truth: Hey, I’m human. I made a mistake. I thought I knew a fact and I didn’t and I didn’t bother to have another editor read it before I sent it out over my name and under the Post-Star brand.

(Mark Wilson is an editorial cartoonist and illustrator living in Saranac Lake, NY. Since 1999 his work has appeared in news media across upstate New York, including, from 2000-2003, the Post-Star.)

*Note to readers: Links to charts and graphs from earlier postings in this series were broken in December 2012. They have been restored.

Beating a dead horse at The Post-Star

by contributor Mark Wilson

Part of a series on the troubles at The Post-Star and its parent company Lee Enterprises.

Post-Star Editor Ken Tingley is charging into the Valley of Death once again. In the latest effort to rescue up the battered image of daily newspapers, Mr. Tingley’s Sunday column contrasted newspaper reports on unfolding events in the Boston area last week with information posted to social media outlets. Despite abundant evidence to the contrary, he generalized that, “the beauty of print journalism is [that] you get to check and recheck your facts. There is time to evaluate and debate the context of a news story, where it should be played and even which words should be used.”

Even if you discount the obvious embarrassment of the New York Post's two glaring front page falsehoods, Mr. Tingley seems to have already forgotten the mistake made by the Associated Press—the service that the Post-Star relied on heavily for its coverage of the bombing, siege and manhunt—when it erroneously reported the imminent arraignment of both suspects on Wednesday. Had the rumor moved over the wire at press time, it is likely that understaffed newspapers like the Post-Star would have run it. Mr. Tingley also conveniently ignores the fact that his editors, under the Post-Star brand, retweeted the AP’s announcement of the bogus news story, immediately and without independent verification or subsequent retraction.

The real lesson from last week—one evidently lost on Mr. Tingley—is that in news gathering nothing beats an eye-witness account. Sadly, it is a resource that newspapers and their hired wire services are less and less able to afford. Fortunately, if you can tolerate all the derivative nonsense, such accounts may often be found on the internet.

In concluding his Sunday column, Mr. Tingley expressed his hope that “maybe there is a place for a plodding old war horse like the daily newspaper after all.”

It is a fittingly dated metaphor: The last US Army horseback cavalry charge took place seventy one years ago on the Bataan Peninsula, Philippines. Today’s military horses are used for reenactments, parades and funerals.

I was wrong: people really are content with our political system

Looks like it's time for a mea culpa.

It seems Americans are overwhelmingly content with how our political system is functioning.

I believe there were only four candidates who were on the ballot in enough states to form an electoral college majority. Democrat Obama, Republican Romney, Green Jill Stein and Libertarian Gary Johnson.

If you wanted a candidate who represented real human beings (presuming you didn't consider corporations to be such), if you wanted someone who opposed militarism and if you wanted someone who opposed corporate control of government, there were only two choices: Stein and Johnson. They were very different candidates but they were the only candidates who were pushing those fundamental conditions needed to make America into a true republican democracy.

I thought the time was right for a decent smaller party showing. People were very lukewarm about Obama and Romney. The last few years saw some very significant grassroots movements in the Tea Party (which we forget really was grassroots originally before it was hijacked by the far right money machine), by Occupy movement and the Ron Paul insurgency inside the Republican Party. This was anti-establishment discontent we hadn't seen since the days of the Vietnam aggression. Johnson and Stein were two very active, substantive candidates. They were aggressive in their use of social media (whose influence on politics is vastly overstated but in the face of a media blacklist, it was the best they could do). Each represented a significant demographic: true small government advocates dissatisfied with Republican hypocrisy on the issue and progressives disillusioned with Obama's complete abandonment of their agenda. I knew the media blacklist would be a significant barrier but I still Johnson and Stein had a reasonable shot to get 5 or 6 percent of the vote between them.

They actually combined to get 1.3 percent of the vote; all smaller candidates only combined for 2 percent. Now, 1.3 and 2 percents were orders of magnitude greater than the amount of media coverage they received, but it was still only 2 percent who voted for real change of some sort or other to our political system. 

Thus 98 percent of voters voted to fundamentally preserve the status quo.

Americans complain about divided government but elected another divided government.

Congress has an approval rating of 21 percent but 90-something percent of incumbents were re-elected, as is usually the case.

People complain about both Democrats and Republicans but over 99 percent of members of Congress will be of those two parties.

Everything bad piece of public policy Americans complain about was enacted by Republicans, Democrats or, more often, both. Every 'onerous tax,' every 'job killing regulation,' every billion wasted on corporate welfare, every war of aggression that you complain about was enacted by one or both of the parties supported by 98 percent of the voters.

From this, I can draw one of two conclusions. Either Americans are actually fairly satisfied with the functioning of our political system or they are unhappy but aren't really interested in doing anything about it. Either way, the incessant whining is not compatible with either of these two options. If you're happy, why are you whining? If you're unhappy, then go beyond whining and try to do something about it.

I was wrong. I believed people when they said they wanted certain things or held certain values. But I guess was wrong to assume they'd vote for those things or values. And of course, some truly did. But from what I can tell, most didn't. Most voted against a candidate, not for one. That's their prerogative. And I'd be wrong to say I don't understand the reasoning. But I simply fail to see how change will every happen if only 2 percent of the people are willing to make it happen. 

Or maybe they really don't want it to happen. Maybe they are not interested in any sort of real change on the federal level. So be it. I accept that's democracy. Just quit whining when you get what you choose.

Now people need to take the next step and quit whining about what they don't want or are not willing to change.

The insidiousness of lazy, casual bias

In a rapidly changing landscape, there is one article of faith among the pooh-bahs of the press: the main reason that traditional media are better than the new media is trustworthiness. Blogs, Twitter and other Internet outlets merely echo rumor and speculation, often because of an ideological agenda. Newspapers, magazines and broadcasters are superior because they always verify claims before publishing them. Or at least that's the contention.

The actions of the Glens Falls Post-Star give lie to this claim and also highlights the daily's rapidly declining standards. 

The Post-Star has long been a divisive part of the community with its editorials reflexively hostile to teachers unions. These editorials wrongly demonize teachers for wanted to be treated like high-qualified professionals when the real culprit for high school taxes is a completely insane structure of education funding in the state. However, a recent editorial highlights just how lazy and casual this bias is.

Its October 1 "Boos and Bravos" section, which states the paper's formal editorial opinion, deplored the 16-month contract impasse between the teachers union and the school board in Warrensburg. Pretty vanilla stuff. In the past, the paper has also called for more transparency in budget negotiations. No objection there.

But the paper goes on to declare that because of the wording of state education law, it can only surmise that this is a stall tactic by the teachers union...

Wait, what?

I thought they were a newspaper. Why do they have to "surmise"?

If they wanted, they could do some actual journalism to try to reveal whether the impasse really was because of a "stall tactic" or whether there was some other reason. 

What would a responsible news outlet would do? Do in a little digging, find out the truth and then let that reality guide their editorial opinion 

Instead, the paper does exactly what the pooh-bahs so often convict the new media of doing: publishing reckless, inflammatory speculation to suit an ideological agenda.

The previous week, the paper did publish a news article on the impasse. But the article did not quote district or union officials as to their positions. 

The paper may or may not have reported on such details in the past, but if it had, then it could have cited those details rather than just "surmising." 

It just assumes that this particular impasse is the teachers fault -- a position that conveniently correlates with its past editorials against teachers unions -- for no concrete reason. This sort of lazy, casual bias is the most insidious kind.

The gutting of The Post-Star's staff and the economic straits of its parent company have been widely chronicled in this blog.

Maybe The Post-Star doesn't have the resources to do decent journalism of the sort that getting to the bottom of this story might require. But if they can't inform the public about what's going on in Warrensburg, then it should remain silent until it's willing and able do its job. Reckless speculation with no stated basis in fact is beneath what a purportedly responsible news organization should be engaging in.

An inconvenient truth

Earlier this month, The Post-Star's Will Doolittle published a blog entry regarding a Syracuse Post-Standard article on the Adirondack Park Agency and the Adirondack Club and Resort in Tupper Lake. Doolittle, a long time harsh critic of the Agency and of green groups, criticized the central New York daily for shallow, 'he said, she said' journalism. He goes on to add further 'context' that the Syracuse paper should have, in his opinion, included about how the environmentalists were wrong.

I left a comment on the PostStar.com blog saying that Doolittle was essentially attacking the Syracuse paper for not pushing his personal viewpoint. I also pointed out that the shallow 'he said, she said' transcription (not journalism) is a staple of most newspapers and broadcast outlets, including The Post-Star itself. Maybe that's why the daily doesn't do any reporting on Fred Monroe's taxpayer-funded anti-APA activist group.

I guess the comment hit too close to home. The comment has not been published more than two weeks later.

The 'suffocating, self-imposed conformity' of political reporters

The Common Dreams website ran a great essay on the stultifying reporting (not to be confused with journalism) of the presidential campaigns. It describes the corporate media's 'suffocating, self-imposed conformity of reporters and commentators' which results in an obsession with tactics and particularly the facile horse race/polling punditry - all at the expense of serious, issue-based journalism. The conscious blacklisting of smaller party and independent candidates is also mentioned.

Media corruption and sycophancy

A couple of recent stories highlight the current ethical state of the corporate media.

Yapping head David Gergen, a senior analyst at CNN, came under fire for not being sufficiently transparent about his ties to Bain Capital, the private equity firm once lead by GOP presidential contender Mitt Romney. In addition to yapping about the current presidential race, Gergen has been a spinmeister in the administrations of presidents Nixon, Ford, Reagan and Clinton.

The Huffington Post reported: Gergen, while acknowledging his "bias" on Monday [July 16], wrote how he's "come to admire and like the leaders of Bain Capital" because the firm "stands out for the respect in which it is generally held and for the generous philanthropy of some of its partners."

Commentator Andrew Sullivan said this embodied "what's wrong with the press corps."

And he's right. This is hardly the first time the corporate media has offered openly biased observers, under the guise of objective analysts, with financial ties to topics they were discussing. 

There are many other examples but the most infamous recent one was during the aggression against and occupation of Iraq. The War Department hired a number of retired senior military officials to spout the party line. They were presented on cable news [sic] shows as objective, credible analysts, not paid flacks of a Pentagon propaganda campaign.

I suppose this isn't surprising since, while liberals like to single out Fox, there is precious little journalism on any of the so-called cable news channels. It's all speculation and analysis... apparently corrupted analysis.

But there is a different form of corruption, which shows the degree to which the 'watchdog' media is in bed with, or perhaps afraid of, those it's supposed to be watching.  

The Guardian, much derided by one regular reader of this blog but a much more vigorous watchdog than any daily in this country, reported that several major US media outlets have been submitting quotes to the campaigns of President Obama and Mitt Romney for approval before publication. The UK daily cited The New York Times and The Los Angeles Times as papers who were reviewing this policy.

The Guardian reported: Jay Rosen, professor of journalism at New York University agreed that "this is not a new problem", but said it had got worse.

"There have always been sources that tried to win these terms, and lately more and more have succeeded. What was new and significant in the Times story was that quote approval is now the norm for a whole layer of campaign sources; most of the reporters working the beat had already come to terms with that, the Times suggested."

Rosen said that reporters told him that the process has been building for years under George Bush and now Barack Obama.

It is not clear why this was done. But the corporate media has shown that it prizes one thing above all else: access. It doesn't seem to care if it actually uses that access for any sort of public service, as long as the reporters (not all of them act as journalists) get invited to fancy parties and White House comedy jam sessions. I suspect the quote approval abdication of duty was done to preserve this meaningless access.


In an industry that pats itself on the back as the national guardian of transparency and questioning - the party line is the democracy would collapse if such sycophantic reporting disappeared -  the degree to which the big corporate media outlets themselves are compromised would shock a lot of people.

Then again, given the decreasing respect in which the media is held, maybe it wouldn't.  


Update: James Fallows has a good column on how the media will have to start understanding the difference between 'objectivity' and 'neutrality.' It's telling how truly substantive investigative reporting - Fallows for The Atlantic, Seymour Hersch for The New Yorker, Matt Taibbi for Rolling Stone and independent author Prof. Chalmers Johnson - is all found outside the context of daily newspapers and television.

Also, for those interested, Prof. Rosen is on Twitter.

Post-Star paywall gets bigger

The Post-Star seems intent on making its reach as small as possible, somehow calculating this will help their bottom line. Despite plummeting quality, such as managing to misspell the name of its own hometown in a baseball box score yesterday, and a rapidly shrinking workforce, the Glens Falls daily has seen fit to nearly triple its newsstand price in the last few years.

On May 1 of this year, the paper announced that it would be imposing a paywall on its website. Users would be limited to 15 free article views per 30 days.

Apparently without warning (I can not verify this due to the restrictions), the paper at some point recently has reduced this to 10 free articles.

Buy A Falling Star

by contributor Mark Wilson

Part of a series on the troubles at The Post-Star and its parent company Lee Enterprises.

The Audit Bureau of Circulations has released paid newspaper readership figures for the six month period ending March 31. The report brings more hard news for the Glens Falls Post-Star. With average daily circulation standing at 24,578, the paper showed a loss of 1,455 paying readers since last October. Compared to a year ago, the average daily circulation is off 1,029 or roughly 4 percent. This places the Post-Star in the middle of the pack of nearby newspapers—the Albany Times Union showed a slight gain in paid readership over last year, while the Saratogian and Troy Record reported heavier losses of 5.7% and 7.5% respectively. Of the four regional papers, only the Post-Star showed deteriorating numbers in the second half of the past twelve month period.

With the latest report, the Post-Star has officially broken below the 25,000 average daily circulation level, a threshold which many organizations recognize when bestowing annual newspaper awards. With the general collapse of newspaper circulation over the past decade, the number of newspapers occupying the under 25,000 category has swelled, far surpassing occupants at higher levels.

While the Post-Star’s circulation losses are middling in comparison with neighboring papers, its performance against the rest of the newspapers owned by Lee Enterprises were considerably worse. Over the past six months, the Post-Star suffered the third highest percentage circulation losses of all fifty papers owned in whole or part by Lee. Perhaps of greater concern, against the firmament of Lee papers, the Post-Star has dropped farther than any other over the past five-and-a-half-years, dropping from the twelfth largest Lee property in October 2006, to twentieth (the ranking figures in the accompanying table take into account the various Lee properties that either merged or were sold over the years).

The Post-Star’s harrowing circulation drop might well explain why the newspaper moved so suddenly at the end of April to subscribed access for its online content: while plenty of people may be reading the Post-Star, fewer and fewer are buying it.

Hitting the Paywall: The Post-Star and other Lee properties resort to fee-for-online content

Part of a series on troubles at The Post-Star and its parent company Lee Enterprises

by contributor Mark Wilson

The Post-Star of Glens Falls announced in Monday’s editions that as of midnight May 1, they will charge a subscription for access to most online content. Officials at Lee Enterprises, Inc.—the Post-Star’s Davenport Iowa-based corporate parent—announced in late March that most of the company’s 48 daily newspapers would erect a paywall before the end of the year. The announcement comes at a precarious time for the Post-Star, Lee Enterprises and newspapers in general. Over the past decade, the industry has been staggered by numerous body-blows, many delivered by online and mobile technologies; some, sadly, self-inflicted. National, local retail and classified advertising, once roughly three quarters of Lee’s operating revenue dropped by over 40% between the second quarter of 2006 and the most recent second quarterly report released in early April. While part of that loss can be blamed on the national recession (income which may eventually return) most of the missing ad revenue has been steadily raided by national online advertising engines like Google, Groupon, Monster and Craigs List. That revenue is gone for good. As reported in earlier installments, much of Lee Enterprises’ financial woes stem from its wildly over-leveraged and over-priced purchase of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch (and the rest of the Pulitzer chain of newspapers), overseen by CEO Mary Junck and CFO Carl Schmidt in 2005. The resulting debt landed the company in bankruptcy court at the beginning of this year. The court-ordered reorganization seems only likely to prolong a grim reckoning for another few years.

At the annual meeting of Lee shareholders in March, corporate directors rewarded Junck and Schmidt with $500,000 and $250,000 bonuses, respectively, for piloting the company through a “successful” bankruptcy. While this amounts to an insignificant fraction of Lee’s annual costs, at a time when Lee headquarters was ordering damaging layoffs at papers across the country, the bonuses attracted unwelcome attention.

At the local level, the fiscal mess in Iowa has translated into increased layoffs (diluting valuable local content) and increased prices passed along to the consumer. Either one of the increases would be a tough sell to a readership in the grips of a national recession. Combined, they constitute an assault on even the most dedicated or dependent audience.

In April 2010 the Post-Star doubled the newsstand price of its print editions, little more than a year after laying off 15.5% (25) of its listed staff (business and editorial). Post-Star circulation losses of 4.62% the year of the layoffs ballooned to 10.58% after the price hike—the fourth worst circulation losses in Lee’s entire portfolio. Needless to say, loss of paying readers only compounded advertising revenue losses.

Of course, two years ago much of the paying Post-Star readership could easily retreat to the free content available at PostStar.com (visits to which have been growing steadily for years). The hope underlying yesterday’s erection of the paywall is that the paper will manage to reconvert enough of these online free-readers into paying news consumers, thereby reversing circulation revenue losses (which—in context—are still only 6.6% of advertising losses).

The success of this plan or its failure—a potentially accelerated migration of readers—hinges on the outcome of two major uncertainties: The first is what role increased free-print and online competition in the Post-Star’s circulation region—NCPR, Adirondack Almanack and Denton Publications to the north, Saratoga Today, WAMC, the Times Union and YNN (Time Warner Cable) to the south, and the Chronicle within the city—will have in providing Post-Star readers with satisfactory alternatives. The second is how the Post-Star’s most recent layoffs—including the closure of its Saratoga Bureau and the attenuation of its northern coverage—might undermine readers’ loyalties in those vulnerable regions.

Statistically, the answer to these questions will begin to emerge in six months when the Audit Bureau of Circulations reports semi-annual circulation and online activity numbers.

Anecdotally, the answer may be more immediate. The Post-Star’s report yesterday of the paywall’s imminent introduction drew a high volume of comments from online readers. By six o’clock yesterday 82 readers had registered 94 reactions. A casual count of those comments showed roughly three of every four commenters objecting (a majority forcefully) to the move with one of every eight either resigned to or tepidly in favor of the move.

The gutting of The Post-Star's content continues

Mark Wilson has a post over at Adirondack Almanack on the further gutting of the news department at the Glens Falls daily.

The curious intersection of journalism, editorial agenda and loss of faith in the media

It's pretty clear from anyone reading Post-Star editorials is that the paper's agenda is devoted to making people believe that Adirondack Park Agency regulations are suffocating the (human) life out of the Adirondack Park. This is despite the statistical fact that the Park's population is growing *faster* that New York's population as a whole.

However, that agenda is also reflected in its supposedly objective news coverage. I've written about this before so I won't belabor previous points. But more recently, reporter Jon Alexander described Hamilton County as 'on the endangered list.'

Now, this was tagged as 'analysis' (ie: opinion) but it does give some insight into his point of view, which happily corresponds with the editorial board's agenda. In a column in Adirondack Almanack, John Warren took serious issue with Alexander's 'analysis.'

Yet in a purportedly objective news story yesterday (doesn't seem to be available online), Alexander notes that Saratoga County's population is growing while Most of the North Country continues to hemorrhage population...

(Again, don't forget the data you'll never see the daily report on)

But the graphic accompanying the article showed that from 2010 to 2011, Hamilton County lost 0.8% of its population, Essex County lost 0.3% of its population,Washington County lost 0.2% of its population and Warren County actually *gained* population. (And even Saratoga County's 'boom' was a modest 0.4%)

While these numbers aren't stellar, they hardly constitute a 'hemorrhage.' But when there's a narrative to conform to...

Additionally, Hamilton County lost 42 residents last year. If the county continue losing that many people every year, it would take 115 years for the 'endangered' county's population to run out. And there's no indication yet that this decline is a long term trend. Hamilton County *gained* population in every census from 1950 to 2000. And since the county was founded, its population has increased in 14 out of the 20 censuses. The county's population has had modest ups and downs in its history, but mostly ups.

But this is not the only seeming intersection of editorial agenda and journalism.

Another of the daily's agendas is its crusade against school spending, which it attributes to malefic and greedy teachers unions.

In an article on Friday (also not available online), education reporter Omar Ricardo Aquije described a meeting between the Glens Falls school board and residents regarding the district's proposed budget.

According to the article, both in text and graphic, the overall tax levy would remain identical from the current fiscal year to the next.

And yet, the jump headline on the inside page B5 blared "Residents question raises, tax increases."

I questioned this discrepancy in an email; the reporter indicated that his figures were correct and that the headline (typically written by layout people... or copy editors, assuming they still have any) was incorrect. The reporter wrote the story honestly. But the headline writer's mistake, was it incompetence or outright deceit? Neither reflects well on the paper's declining standards.

A correction ran in the following day's issue, as usual in print significantly smaller than the original wrong headline.

I don't have any evidence that this was intentional deceit on the part of the paper's backroom staff (I don't blame the reporter, since his text was correct). But this is a very significant error, given how sensitive a topic school budgets are in this area. It certainly undermines what's left of the paper's credibility when these sorts of significant 'errors' in purportedly objective articles just happen to oh so conveniently jive with the paper's editorial crusades.


But for its faults, at least The Post-Star isn't stealing material from regional blogs and writers. More on that later this week.

Update: Today, managing editor Ken Tingley tells us that credibility is key to what they do. No wonder they're in so much trouble.

Layoffs at Post-Star while parent company gives CEO nice bonus

Part of a series on troubles at The Post-Star and its parent company Lee Enterprises

by contributor Mark Wilson

Following months of seeming good news for Lee Enterprises, Inc., The Davenport Iowa Newspaper corporation which owns the Post-Star, has launched another round of layoffs across its portfolio.

The staff contact page at PostStar.com, which yesterday listed fifty-eight employees in Editorial and Business positions at the Glens Falls paper, today lists only fifty-one. Among the seven missing names/positions are:

• Photographer Aaron Eisenhauer


• Copy Editor Christopher Fitz Gerald
• Saratoga and Washington County Reporter Thomas Dimopoulos
• Washington County reporter Jamie Munks
• Washington County reporter David Taube
• Sportswriter Mary Albl
• Sportswriter Larry Hall

Stacy Perrone has also left the Post Star advertising department, but her position has been filled by Jillian Vitagliano.

Of these seven, Fitz Gerald, Munks and Albl had the shortest tenure at the paper, joining the staff only last Fall. Taube's first bylines and Eisenhauer's first photos appeared in the summer of 2010, Dimopoulos joined the newspaper in March 2007 and Larry Hall, the longest-serving member of the group, dates back over a decade to October of 2001. Similar layoffs have been announced at newspapers throughout Lee's stable of 49 daily newspapers.

In other news, Lee Enterprise this past week filed papers with the SEC declaring a $500,000 bonus for Chief Operating Office Mary Junck, and a $250,000 bonus for Chief Financial Officer Carl Schmidt. The two were credited at last week's shareholder meeting in Davenport with seeing the company through chapter 11 Bankruptcy earlier this year, despite assuring investors less than a year ago that the publisher's dire economic straights were not bankrupting the company.

The two head officers have also staved off delisting of the company stock from the New York Stock Exchange, with the assurance that the company's shareholders would accept a reverse stock split. Last week, Shareholders gave Lee's directors authority to go ahead with the reverse split—a move that could multiply the price of stock shares. The directors must decide on the ratio of the reverse split sometime before June.

Lee remains under a second delisting threat owing to the drop of its market capitalization (the number of outstanding shares times the share price) below $50 million. While recent movement of shares has pushed Lee's market capitalization above the threshold, the company has until next year to strengthen investor confidence and maintain the higher value for the long term.

This week's layoffs and last week's announcement that the web sites of all Lee newspapers will charge visitors subscription fees by the end of the year are the first mobilizations in that effort.

Post-Star likely to go behind paywall this year

A reader pointed me to this press release by Lee Enterprises. In it, the Post-Star's parent company announced a paywall would be imposed on more Lee newspaper websites in the next three months and in most Lee markets by the end of the year. The New York Times recently announced that net surfers would only be able to access 10 free articles per month, down from 20; it is not clear if Post-Star readers will be able to access any free articles. The Iowa-based corporation certainly hopes this process goes more smoothly than the disastrous and quickly abandoned PostStar.net scheme of the early 2000s.

Media diversity

'Liberal': we need to forge an international consensus and get UN approval so we can nuke Iran (or whatever the officially decreed Hitler-esque regime of the month happens to be).

Conservative: Screw the UN. Let’s nuke Iran now!

This is what passes for a diversity of voices in the mainstream media.

Greens and media bias, Occupy and outsourcing police

A show on the excellent al-Jazeera English explored the question of whether the Green Party could influence this year's US elections. It's a sad indictment of our corporate media and its biases that the only mainstream media outlets that acknowledge the existence of the third largest party in the United States are non-American ones. In a related piece, NPR's Ombudsman explored accusations by American hero Ralph Nader that the public broadcaster ignores real progressives.

Speaking of NPR, it also pointed that just because that rumors of the Occupy movement's imminent death are greatly exaggerated.

Privatization of public resources, one of Occupy's main objections, have led to some disastrous scandals. The partial privatization of the military led to a variety of scandals with Blackwater including corruption, impunity and human rights abuses. The privatization of some prisons has led to Orwellian nightmares like Pennsylvania's Kids for Cash scandal. But a few people were making a lot of money out of these hideous abuses. So it's appalling, yet not surprising, that a few police forces in Britain are also outsourcing some of their public safety duties. Let's hope this reckless experimentation is short-lived and, especially, that it doesn't cross the Atlantic.