Soapbox

Do the editors the Columbus Dispatch, along with the major networks’ Evening News, assume that Americans all have a subscription to the New York Times and read TheDailyKos online? Is that the reason why the Dispatch, week after week, fails to cover important, breaking stories critical of the Bush administration? Do you figure that your subscribers are already reading about it on blogs or other newspapers and only need you to report on votes by the School Board?

That must be why the Dispatch is keeping silent on the story of Jeff “not really” Gannon, the fake reporter given daily access to the White House to ask the President sycophantic, softball questions despite using an assumed name, having no legitimate press credentials and managing several gay military porn websites. You must assume that we already heard how he was apparently given access to information on the Valerie Plame leak even before it hit the mainstream press, when he wasn’t even a real reporter. I’m sure, if this happened in a Democratic administration we would be reading daily updates on your front page!

You must also be guessing that we are well-acquainted with the recently released documents sent by Richard Clarke to Condoleesa Rice on January 25th, 2005 that appear to put the lie to her sworn statement that “No Al Qaeda plan was turned over to the new administration”. You must be confident that we have already read Clarke’s plan and his urgent request for a principal’s level meeting, saying, “We would make a major error if we underestimated the challenge al Qida poses.” and so can judge for ourselves if the administration truly did all it could to prevent 9/11.

Though you give us daily updates on the trial of pop star michale Jackson, we hear nothing from The Dispatch about Fox News reporter Brit Hume. He took sentence and sentence fragments from a speech by Franklin Roosevelt and re-arranged them to make the claim that FDR supported privatizing when in fact, he never made any statement of the kind. This is a deliberate con job by a “news organization” to sell the American people a pig in a poke, but either you do not consider journalistic prostitutes hired by the President to be “news” or you think we already know all about this.

Sadly, these assumptiopns are not true. While surveys have shown that only 22% of people under the age of 65 rely on news broadcast or newspapers for their news, sadly, there are still Dispatch subscribers who hear nothing of the mis-steps and malfeasance of the Bush administration unless a truly balanced news source is brave enough to report them.

Is the Dispatch such a source? Or will more and more central Ohio residents have to turn to another source for complete, accurate news?