Below is a comment from a long-time reporter at the Sacracmento Bee sent to wp2. We thought it was too good not to share with those visiting the site. We also appreciate recent contacts from the Statesman newsroom on material Dan Popkey decided to withhold from readers on several issues. We will do something Popkey doesn’t bother to do. We will get sources and make sure the information is accurate.
“After putting up with McClatchy’s flagship newspaper, The Sacramento Bee, for 25 years I can tell you that you haven’t seen anything yet. The McClatchy’s long ago abandoned journalistic principles in favor of promoting their own social/progressive world view. Their papers don’t present the world as it is, they show you the world as they would like it to be. I’m sure they see the Statesman as an opportunity to reshape the Idaho local yokels into a more California-acceptable mindset. The real journalists will leave the paper, if they haven’t already, and the only people who will be left are those who feel they know better than you what you should think, and will write their stories accordingly.”
Extra notes: Statesman ad sales are still off and McClatchy stock drops to $10.00 a share.
January 20, 2008 at 4:15 am |
And this is news? The Statesman has been doing just that for years!!
January 20, 2008 at 10:06 pm |
Ten Reasons you should cancel your subscription to the Idaho Statesman:
10. The puppy has been house trained.
9. You don’t have a bird in a birdcage.
8. The butcher wraps your fish in WAXED paper
7. A daily crossword can be printed from puzzles.usatoday.com and more than 200,000 other sites.
6. A daily sudoku can be printed from dailysudoku.com and about 1500 other sites.
5. The Nampa Press Tribune carries complete stories about news in Ada County.
4. Daily weather AND future forecasts for any city in the world can be found at weather.com and 8 million other sites.
3. You have a television.
2. You’re paying FULL price for only HALF the news in every story.
1. You thought you were subscribing to The Statesman and you got the Enquirer.
January 23, 2008 at 8:43 pm |
We can hardly be surprised when the Statesman offers their “we thought you should know what we found” explanation without offering the whole picture.
Case in point, their disturbing full front page Craig story that included the Colorado prostitute. This was a guy who had been publicly discredited by the gay blogger who they felt was important enough to send Popkey to DC to interview – however, his dismissal of the prostitute as a liar was not included in the story.
Furthermore, the organization that had hosted Craig in Colorado gave Popkey a detailed timeline of the visit – including giving him the name and number of the staffer who picked him up at the airport late in the day, drove him to Keystone, some 70 odd miles away, arriving late in the evening. After a breakfast meeting in the morning the same staffer drove him back to the airport. So Popkey had every bit of information he need to prove the story was impossible, yet he went with it anyway – with the silly disclaimer that it could neither be proven nor disproven (clearly not true, as he had the facts to disprove.)
Then there is the frivolous story about the individual in DC in 1987. Popkey, who had been covering Craig for decades, knew full well that he did not have a townhome on Capitol Hill at that time and lived on a boat in Southwest DC. Again, knew full well the facts and chose to write fiction.
It is so disheartening that individuals such as Popkey and his ilk at the Statesman have the power to print whatever they want unchecked.