Waynesville Republican Sam Edwards announced he would take on Rep. Ray Rapp, a Mars Hill Democrat.
Edwards's announcement paints him as a man of Main Street, declaring: "Mayberry needs to increase and Raleigh needs to decrease."
"Although Raleigh has its uses," he explains further, "'Mayberry' is where the people really live, and work, and have to suffer the consequences of expensive and irresponsible government policies.”
Edwards said he is a pastor, educator, writer and political conservative. He calls for reducing taxes, government spending, unnecessary regulations, unfunded mandates on county governments, state interference in local school board decisions, and barriers to third-party candidacies.
I look forward to seeing how the 9-12 Project in Haywood County will step up to the plate and help Edwards win this state level race. I'm hoping that their enthusiasm for politics at the national level can be translated into action on the state and local scene...
Asheville Citizen-Times reporter Leslie Boyd announced today that she's quitting her job to work full-time on advocating for health care reform through an organization she helped establish in the name of her son, who died of cancer.
Boyd's announcement comes about two weeks after local bloggers and Erika Franzi, the organizer of the Asheville Tea Party protests, called attention to Boyd's work and alleged that she'd violated the newspaper's code of ethics government reporters and their behavior when it comes to covering the news. Background is hereand here.
...
I had thought I would take this step in about six months, but recent events have spurred me on. Erica Franzi's posts ( I don't read Thunderpig or the others) have made me realize I can be much more effective when I'm not working as a reporter. I'm free now to debunk misinformation about the proposed health care plan and perhaps to get people talking like grownups about what we need and whether there is a better plan than the one before Congress now.
Source: AshVegas (read the complete statement there)
Asheville bloggers have taken on the lefty bias of local media outlets, including the Asheville Citizen-Times and WLOS-TV in Asheville. I was alerted to this story via Twitter by @LiberT who also has a blog called Fr33 Asheville.
Previously, Freedom Works held a Health Care protest in front of Blue Dog Democrat Congress Heath Shuler's office in Asheville, and the Asheville Citizen-Times did not send a reporter to cover the event (despite giving copious amounts of coverage to lefty rallies & protests), and the WLOS story focused more attention to the opposing side, and most of the coverage they gave the protest was focused on advocating FOR Government-run health care. Witness the video below:
A new Asheville blogger [since October 2008], Jane Q Republican, has noted the activism of one of the Asheville Citizen-Times reporters, Leslie Boyd. Here is an excerpt:
For evidence of whether Ms. Boyd’s involvement has influenced the news, I refer you to last week’s rally in opposition to Nationalized Healthcare. On Friday, July 17, over 250 area citizens gathered at the Asheville office of Heath Shuler (D-NC11) in opposition to the proposed government takeover of healthcare. The Asheville Citizen-Times did not send a single reporter or photographer. To date, not a single word in Asheville’s only daily newspaper has been devoted to this event.
When Ms. Boyd became a journalist, she made the choice to be an impartial observer and reporter of the news. She promised to uphold a code of ethics which prohibits her from entering into public politics and activism. This was a career choice that she made and, judging by the name she has made for herself at the Asheville Citizen-Times, it was a good one. If she has now changed her mind and wishes to enter the political activism arena, that is indeed her prerogative. What she may not do, however, is straddle the fence between the two occupations. She may not make the news and report it too.
At least, not if she is held to the standards of her employment contract . That remains to be seen.
Source: Jane Q Republican (read the whole article, which includes email exchanges between the blogger and the newspaper)
Another blogger covering this is Tim Peck. This is a portion of what he has to contribute:
Asheville Citizen-Times reporter Leslie Boyd has violated the code of journalistic ethics by participating in partisan political events as an advocate while also covering the story for her employer. Boyd is pictured on the WNC for Change website as the keynote speaker at the recent Healthcare Reform Rally held at Pritchard Park in Asheville on June 20, 2009.
Source: Tim Peck (he goes on to provide links and photos of the Moveon Rally...which Boyd was unable to attend at the last moment).
I'll add my two cents worth to the kitty by noting what Leslie Boyd has posted herself online regarding how she sees her job and her advocacy for the nationalization of healthcare.
From her Ning Network blog (created by the Asheville Citizen-Times):
Things here have been pretty bleak. We had layoffs yesterday. Rob and I escaped, but we had friends who worked here a long time who got cut. I feel like I'm watching the demise of an entire industry. But it's more than just an industry, and being a reporter is more than just a job. We felt like we had a higher calling: to be watchdogs of government and big business, to dig out the truth and to inform the public. We have been the children of the First Amendment. Now most papers have too few people in the newsroom to do any investigative reporting. We can report on government meetings, but we can't dig any deeper. We can write about the new office building being put up, but not on the dealings that helped it get permits in spite of height restrictions or zoning laws.
In the end, government and big business will be able to do what they want, unfettered by the press looking over them. Actually, they pretty much do already.
Source: WNC Mom I lifted the whole post in case it gets tossed down the memory hole.
And another, on her advocacy:
WNC for Change had a health care rally in Asheville this morning and 300 people came out. That's almost twice as many as came out last fall. People are getting worried that this won't get fixed after all, and they want to tell Congress that's not acceptable. I was the keynote speaker, telling Mike's story and noting that he was one of about 30,000 who died last year. Rep. Heath Shuler met with about 50 of us this afternoon and assured us he wants to fix it too, but the law says it has to be defecit neutral. I can think of a few ways to raise the money, but none of them will happen because corporations are more important than people in America. I'm not sure how we'll take it back, but I'm working on it. If you want to see photos of the rally and of Heath Shuler, visit here: [AC-T]
Source: WNC Mom Again, I lifted the entire post for the same reason as the last.
As Jane Q Republican and Tim Peck have pointed out, she covered the rallies for the Asheville Citizen-Times events at which she herself was a speaker and organizer.
A lefty blog had this to say about Leslie Boyd's keynote address at the rally, which the War Resister's League billed as "Asheville Calls for Health Care Revolution":
By far the most powerful speaker was local reporter and health care advocate Leslie Boyd who spoke with “righteous indignation” about her son’s death due to denial of critical health care. She founded the group Life o’ Mike to commemorate her son and to advocate for health care for all.
I have, so far, been unable to locate online video of Boyd speaking at any of these events. If you know of an example, please let me know in the comments, and if you are in possession of such video, let me know in the comments, and I will help you get it posted online.
It is time we held "journalists" accountable. And they wonder why they are held in in low regard by their fellow Americans. I would tell them that their lefty bias has turned a significant portion of their audience off. I quit buying papers from the AC-T over two years ago because I couldn't just take it anymore. Due to the recent cutbacks at the paper, as reported by AshVegas, I have not been the only one.
It would be more acceptable to me if they would come right out and admit that they are lefties instead of pretending they are unbiased.
Let this incident serve notice to the various news media outlets of western North Carolina that they can no longer serve as Gate Keepers of the news, nor can they set the agenda as they have in the past. They should come clean about their biases, as most bloggers do.
When bloggers report on events or news stories, they usually aren't afraid to come right out and tell you what side they are on, and then they proceed to tell you why they believe as they do.
**Note...I have preserved the original spellings in the posts I excerpted for use here.
**9.03am**
As an example of a lefty paper, I give you the Mountain Xpress. Everyone knows they are lefties, and they don't hide it. And the thing is, they often provide better coverage of Asheville in a weekly free paper than the Citizen-Times does with a daily paper.
Here are a couple of videos I took of the weather activity yesterday, the first being an excerpt of the rain on the WCU campus...showing rain being blown off a roof and rain banding on a sidewalk. It rained pretty heavy for a handful of minutes as the leading adge of the thunderstorms swept over the area.
The second video is a little time lapse I did of the arrival of the storm.
My way home last night was blocked by a neighbor's felled tree, that had been split by the storm, and I helped him and his son-in-law make a brush pile out of it. Luckily for him, the tree only did slight damage to his deck railing.
Here are a couple of reports of what the line of storms did around the region:
ASHEVILLE — A severe thunderstorm swept through the area Thursday, downing trees and cutting power to homes in West Asheville.
...
Asheville police reported several trees down after the storm swept though the city about 4:30 p.m. A tree went down on Interstate 26 near the Brevard Road exit while another tree was felled at Coleman Avenue and Conestee Street in North Asheville, dispatchers said.
Rainy weather continued in Western North Carolina on Thursday, causing more than 4,100 Duke Energy customers to lose power, and the pattern is expected through Sunday.
The National Weather Service in Greenville, S.C., issued a severe thunderstorm watch for Western North Carolina until 8 p.m. Thursday. In addition to the thunderstorm watch, the Weather Service also issued a hazardous weather outlook for much of the region.
Residents can expect scattered afternoon thunderstorms, possibly becoming strong to severe, beginning today through Sunday.
With the storms comes the possibility of large hail, damaging winds and heavy downpours.
Thursday afternoon, Duke Energy reported 4,155 homes and businesses without power from downtown Hendersonville to East Flat Rock. By 9:30 p.m., 426 Duke customers in Henderson County were still without power. Transylvania County had 22 Duke customers without power at 9:30 p.m., while Polk had 12.
As I write this another line of less violent storms are approaching the area. From the National Weather Service:
SHORT TERM FORECAST NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE GREENVILLE-SPARTANBURG SC 333 AM EDT FRI JUN 12 2009
NCZ033-048>053-058-059-062>065-501-503-505-507-509-121000- AVERY-BUNCOMBE-BURKE MOUNTAINS-CALDWELL MOUNTAINS-GRAHAM-HAYWOOD- HENDERSON-MACON-MADISON-MCDOWELL MOUNTAINS-MITCHELL-NORTHERN JACKSON- POLK MOUNTAINS-RUTHERFORD MOUNTAINS-SOUTHERN JACKSON-SWAIN- TRANSYLVANIA-YANCEY- 333 AM EDT FRI JUN 12 2009
.NOW... SHOWERS AND THUNDERSTORMS WILL MOVE EAST AND INTO THE NORTH CAROLINA MOUNTAINS FROM EASTERN TENNESSEE THROUGH 6 AM. HEAVY RAINFALL AND GUSTY WINDS WILL ACCOMPANY SOME OF THE THUNDERSTORMS NEAR THE TENNESSEE BORDER.
$
So, I may take the opportunity to take a little nap since it looks like the electrical activity will be to the north and south of me in this round.
**5.04am** I went out and tried to get some shots of the lightning, but chickened out because the dark shapes of the clouds moving fast (I mean FAST) between me and Franklin spooked me real good.
1845 75 ROBBINSVILLE GRAHAM NC 3532 8381 (GSP) 1953 88 BURNSVILLE YANCEY NC 3592 8230 2017 88 7 SE CONOVER CATAWBA NC 3564 8113 SPOTTER REPORTS NICKEL SIZED HAIL ONE MILE WEST OF INTERSECTION OF HIGHWAY 16 AND BUFFALO SHOALS ROAD. (GSP)
WIND REPORTS
900 UNK FRANKLIN MACON NC 3518 8338 TREES DOWN IN FRANKLIN AND THROUGHOUT THE COUNTY (GSP) 1910 UNK BRYSON CITY SWAIN NC 3543 8345 TREES DOWN THROUGHOUT THE COUNTY (GSP) 1930 UNK MARION MCDOWELL NC 3568 8201 TREES DOWN AROUND MARION AND SUGAR HILL AREAS (GSP) 1945 UNK 1 SW CULLOWHEE JACKSON NC 3530 8319 LARGE LIMBS AND SEVERAL TREES BLOWN DOWN (GSP) 2030 UNK LEICESTER BUNCOMBE NC 3565 8269 TREES DOWN (GSP) 2030 UNK SPRUCE PINE MITCHELL NC 3592 8207 SEVERAL TREES DOWN (GSP) 2050 UNK 1 NW ASHEVILLE BUNCOMBE NC 3558 8256 NUMEROUS TREES DOWN IN WEST AND NORTHERN PART OF TOWN (GSP)
Photo: Flickr user Ashe-Villain protesters "crossing the line" to get arrested
President Obama and his lapdogs in the media would have you believe that us conservatives are dangerous and violent people, prone to break the law.
Really?
Last Wednesday, hundreds of thousands of us "right-wing extremists" took to the streets and parks to protest the bailouts and pork passed by Congress.
The only case of near-violence I have heard of is where a CNN Reporter verbally abused protesters instead of reporting on the story...she became the story. The Tea Parties I attended were very peaceable affairs, and there was not a hint of violence...except at the Sylva Tea Partywhere some lefties made obscene gestures or cursed us from their vehicles (it is a college town, after all). We waved and smiled. Even the Freak Capital of the South, Asheville had a peaceful protest.
Now, let's check out a lefty protest...
Dozens of protesters, including a Sylva man, were arrested Monday near Duke Energy's headquarters as they called on the company to halt construction of a coal-fired power plant in Rutherford County.
Police estimated about 250 people gathered in front of the building in Charlotte, loudly but peacefully opposing the $2.4 billion, 800-megawatt generator. Organizers said 44 protesters were arrested on trespassing charges after walking across a line set up by police. Officials from a coalition of environmental groups — which is fighting the project in court and in appeals to state air quality regulators — said they're trying to draw attention to their efforts.
Avram Friedman, 59, of Sylva, was the first person arrested. The executive director of the Canary Coalition, a Sylva-based clean air advocacy organization, said he was protesting to help his family.
“I'm doing it for my children,” Friedman, clad in a gray suit, said as an officer placed him in handcuffs. “This is a real threat. How can we just stand by and watch this go up and not do a thing?”
I could go on and give you dozens of examples. This lefty, Friedman, thinks that crossing a police line and breaking the law is a good thing, and will bring favorable attention to his cause.
I think it will, or should, do the opposite. It should show people that this man has no respect for the law, and will break the law in order to overturn the decision of the N.C. Division of Air Quality in March that "determined that emissions at the new Cliffside plant will not reach the threshold of a “major” polluter".
Why do lefties feel as if they have to get arrested in order to get attention? Why not do it like the right and mobilize hundreds of thousands of people and have "peaceful protest" with speeches, signs and patriotic music?
I know, asking lefties to play patriotic music at a protest is a bit of a stretch...as well as asking them not to break the law.
The Old West-themed amusement park has struggled since reopening in May 2007 after being shuttered for five years.
The park has been unable to secure capital financing to pay off outstanding debts, restructure short-term debts, complete the updating of rides and cover costs associated with running and marketing a regional theme park.
“The economic uncertainty, coupled with the banking and credit crisis that has engulfed the nation, has made obtaining a lender very difficult,” said Steve Shiver, Ghost Town's president and chief executive officer. The park filed for bankruptcy protection Tuesday.
-=SNIP=-
Lynn Sylvester, one of Ghost Town's five managing partners, offered a glimmer of hope for the park's reorganization.
“Ghost Town is part of the history of Western North Carolina,” she said. “We are committed to preserving our theme park through this re-organizational process. “Given the mission of the Rural Development program to create and retain jobs, the USDA, which has a 70 percent guarantee on the primary loan facility held by BB&T, has signified a willingness to participate in a restructured debt arrangement,” Sylvester said.
Ghost Town plans to reopen for the season on May 15 and is selling season passes and daily admission tickets.
That is too bad. I was at Ghost Town for the re-opening, and enjoyed myself. I have been waiting for the roller-coaster to open for my return trip. I hope that they are able to make it and find their niche in the market.
Here is the video I shot of the very first gunfight at the re-opening:
The bus ride with JB, the Director of Entertainment, keeping the passengers entertained as we went up the hill, [part one] [part two]
CHICAGO-- Newspaper and newspaper groups are likely to default on their debt and go out of business next year -- leaving "several cities" with no daily newspaper at all, Fitch Ratings says in a report on media released Wednesday.
"Fitch believes more newspapers and newspaper groups will default, be shut down and be liquidated in 2009 and several cities could go without a daily print newspaper by 2010," the Chicago-based credit ratings firm said in a report on the outlook for U.S. media and entertainment.
Fitch is generally pessimistic across the board, assigning negative outlets to nearly all sectors from Yellow Pages to radio and TV and theme parks. But the newspaper industry is the most at risk of defaulting, it says.
"Much of the business risk for the media sector is likely to continue to be concentrated within the newspaper sub-sector," the report says. "Fitch expects newspaper industry revenue growth will be negative for the foreseeable future as both ad pricing and linage will be under pressure within each of the four main components of newspaper companies' revenue streams: circulation and local, classified and national advertising. Newsprint costs could rise, and it could be difficult to offset revenue declines with cost cuts."
More bad news for the Democrat Party Stenography Association. If papers focused on reporting news instead of the party line, they might do better. I have canceled all my newspaper subscriptions over the course of a few years because I perceived an unhealthy lefty stance, a laziness in reporting real news, local or national.
I think papers could still pull their fat out of the fire if they were to build their online activities to keep up with fast-breaking news, link more to other "non-newspaper sources" of information in the community and incorporate more ways of producing revenue streams from that content. I have some ideas, but it won't be for free.
Which reminds me...most of the local papers don't incorporate RSS Feeds to push content out the door to draw readers to their website...and those that do, have odd implementation.
According to Ashvegas, the latest round of layoffs at the Asheville Citizen-Times have claimed online gurus Doug Mayer and John Yenne.
Commentary
I think I can safely say without fear of being (successfully) sued that the Asheville Citizen-Times is insane and has not the first clue about the potential for the online news market. Not a freaking clue. If I had the money...I would hire these two in a heartbeat and establish them in an online news website.
I am also glad that the AC-T doesn't get it, for that will leave the bloggers and the (I hate to say it) Mountain Xpress as content kings (or queens) for online information in our area.
At about 8:55 a.m. today, a bus driver leaving the campus saw the female holding what looked like rifle and sling. He returned back to the school and alerted school authorities. School Resource Officer Deputy Terry Tweed called for assistance and the school was placed on emergency lockdown.
When Henderson County Sheriff deputies arrived on scene, they determined the area where the person was sighted was private property and the school was never in any danger.
What in the world is wrong with people? And what is wrong with someone practicing their Constitutional Rights?
When was in school, we carried rifles and shotguns on the school bus during hunting season. When we got to school, we would leave them in the Principal's office. After school, we would cut through the woods on our way home, bagging some squirrels and rabbits as walked home. It was not unusual for a deputy or highway patrolman to stop and shoot the bull with us when we were on the side of the road.
We never shot anyone, or even thought about using our weapons in anger. We did, however, speak in hushed tones about the best ways to take out Russians with them if we were ever invaded. This was in the 70's and very early 80's.
What has happened to us? Someone sees a weapon near a school and they freak out, locking the school down and calling law enforcement? This is teaching our children that weapons are to be feared, and that it is not right for someone to have them.
Due to the policy of "zero tolerance" it would be unwise for anyone to even suggest that they carried weapons on school grounds, or knew of people who did...so I won't go there.
**5.02 pm** The text of his speech as prepared. (He veered off course toward the end of the speech).
**3.13 pm** The event is over. Please remind me not to rely on the Aheville Citizen-Times for live coverage...and it dropped out several times, so I switched over from the unreliable Mogulus player used by the AC-T to the more reliable Ustream player in the middle of his speech. I'll have a round-up of the coverage later.
Obama is in Asheville, and the lefties are loving it.
The senator has been in the area prepping for Tuesdays debate with John McCain in Nashville.
Barack Obama is expected to begin speaking at about 2 pm, and you can watch it here (if you have the stomach). The live coverage has already begun. I will remove the player once the event is over.
I have replaced the AC-T player with the Usteam Obama player. Which works better. Be patient, the Asheville Citizen-Times camera operators keep cutting the camera off every once in a while. It will go black from time to time.
LAFAYETTE, La. – What started as a routine assignment covering the Appalachian State-LSU football game in Baton Rouge has become more of an adventure.
I'm staying in Lafayette, La., just west of Baton Rouge and about 90 miles northwest of New Orleans, to help the Gannett newspaper here (The Advertiser) with Hurricane Gustav coverage.
My assignment Sunday is to go out with a photographer to New Iberia, a nearby community that is under orders for mandatory evacuation, and talk to people about leaving their homes and the uncertaintity they face.
The forecast changes rapidly but right now it sounds like Gustav is set to hit the Louisiana coast around 2 a.m. Monday with winds up to 120 mph and tidal surges of 15-20 feet, which could be more destructive than Katrina.
The forecast for Lafayette includes winds in the 90 mph range; the hurricane veterans around here say that's nothing, but I've never been in that kind of weather before.
State officials are cracking down on towns that haven’t filed plans for conserving water during the drought and the penalty could be as high as $10,000 a month.
The Department of Environment and Natural Resources said today that 55 North Carolina towns are out of compliance with a law passed last year that required municipal water systems to submit water shortage response plans by July 1.
Towns that don’t have their own plans must follow the state’s conservation rules within 10 days of a drought. State rules ban uses such as lawn watering. Local plans must show how water system would deal with a drought.
Now that the Stae of North Carolina has Water Czar Authority granted to them through the passage of S.L. 2008-143 "Drought/Water Management Reccommendations" to levy fines and seek a toehold to put meters on wells.
Just as a note to these water czars, I make it a point to leave the water running after I use public facilities just to spite them.
Lexington, Ala. – Picture the Manhattan skyline filled with Nike swooshes. Or the golden arches of McDonald's gently drifting over Los Angeles.
A special-effects entrepreneur from Alabama has come up with a way to fill the sky with foamy clouds as big as 4 feet across and shaped like corporate logos — Flogos, as he calls them. Advertisement
Francisco Guerra, who's also a former magician, developed a machine that produces tiny bubbles filled with air and a little helium, forms the foam into shapes and pumps them into the sky.
The Walt Disney Co. will use one of the machines next month to send clouds shaped like Mickey Mouse heads into the air at Walt Disney World in Orlando, Fla., Guerra said.
"It's a shock factor when you look up and there's a logo over your head," said Guerra, whose company, Snowmasters Inc., makes machines that churn out fake snow and foam for Hollywood movies and special events.
He developed Flogos at his small factory in northern Alabama — a perfect place for research and development, he said, partly because there aren't many people around to ask questions about the foam shapes that float above the building on test days.
Tomorrow is Yom Hazikaron la Shoah ve-Gvuta, or Yom HaShoah for those of us can't speak Hebrew. It means Remembrance Day for the Holocaust and Heroism. Schedule.
Tomorrow at 10.00am Israel Time everything will stop for two minutes during which time air raid sirens will sound throughout Israel to remember the 6 million dead Jewish victims of Adolf Hitler.
Six million Jews, among them one-and-a-half million children, were murdered in the Shoah while the world remained silent. The worldwide Holocaust memorial project “Unto Every Person There is a Name”, now in its nineteenth consecutive year, is a unique project designed to perpetuate their memory as individuals and restore their identity and dignity, through the public recitation of their names on Yom Hashoah – Holocaust Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Remembrance Day. By personalizing the individual tragedies of the Jewish victims of Nazi Germany and its collaborators, this project counters persistent efforts by enemies of the State of Israel and the Jewish people to deny the reality of the Holocaust and cast it as history’s seminal hoax. “Unto Every Person” also defies attempts to universalize this genocide and cast off its principal characteristic as a unique calamity of the Jewish people, while also building appreciation of the Shoah's tragic impact on the Jewish reality until today.
There are even groups locally. I will not link to them. The point of the last few links is that it can happen again, and we must be ever vigilant in the fight against these evil people. We must never allow them to accumulate power in our nation. It is to our discredit that their brethren have been allowed to accumulate power in the Middle East.
A memo just promulgated onto the web by the odious "Stranger" details the reasons for the mass sackings -- 45 from the newsroom. [Full text after the jump] The money shot is right up on top with
Our circumstances are in line with the newspaper industry nationally, which continues to see steep declines particularly in areas of Classified ad revenue and also a slowing of online revenue growth.
Translation: 1) Craigslist bites deep in high-tech metro areas these days, so deep that large bleeding chunks of staff are now being torn from the news body. 2) Online revenue ain't making it either since who wants to go to the website of a dead-tree product they don't read in the first place? And even if they did, the money sites get from ads online just isn't at all in the realm of what they get for print ads.
Online ad revenues, often touted by blathering publishers with "a vision", never have and never will replace the revenue lost to the print edition.
Of course, the real elephant drooling in the room of newspapers like the Seattle Times these days is "the forgotten reader." These are the potential readers who, because of the unremitting liberal tone and slant of the Times in both the news hole and on the editorial page, loathe the Times and the whole sector of Seattle society it represents.
Now you may say, in a town as overwhelmingly liberal as Seattle, "Screw those troglodyte, Republican morons!" Well, you can say that but then you will, sooner or later, fire 200 of your employees. And that will be only the start.
Why? Because in an "overwhelmingly liberal town" you are talking about, at most, around 55% of the potential readership that agrees with you. This means you are leaving about 45% of potential readership out of the equation altogether. King County has about 2 million people. That means that 45% of potential readership is not at all a trivial number, and yet the Seattle Times takes every opportunity to alienate them. Result: Mass sackings and many millions lost.
And yet the Seattle Times, as well as numerous other newspapers now dying in the US, never ever cops to its point of view as the reason why it is failing.
I think I last purchased an Asheville Citizen-Times about 6 months ago because I was increasingly fed up with the left-slanting news in it's pages. Not just in the news it reported, but the news it failed to report. If 15 lefties had a meeting and were upset about something, you could could bet on the AC-T and WLOS to be there with breathless coverage. (I don't watch WLOS either---too many syrupy puppy stories and lefty newscasting).
A conservative crowd of over a hundred couldn't buy coverage the lefties were getting.
If the AC-T could be counted on to have a few news articles written from a conservative perspective, I'd pick it up more often. Also, if they had a real regional and state news section, it would be another incentive. And longer stories would be nice, too. It seems like they've decided to become a copy of the abominable USA Today. (Yes, I know Gannett now owns the paper).
My local papers, the Franklin Press and Macon News are basically the same way, and I rarely purchase the Press, but since the News is free, I pick it up nearly every week, whether I intend to read it or not. It's main value is a very strong Community Calender. If people are meeting or a candidate for office is speaking, it will be there.
What the author of the article didn't mention is that there is another reason papers or local TV don't give coverage from a conservative viewpoint...the cries of protest from the intolerant lefties who cannot tolerate a whisper of conservatism from news outlets.
Remember the outcry when the New York Slimes hired William Kristol as a Op-Ed columnist? Look at this article in Think Progress and be sure to read the comments by your typical "multi-cultural" lefty. Not very tolerant of another's opinion, eh? It appears that lefties want blacklists filled with conservatives.
That is a case of a hard left news outlet hiring a conservative to pen opinion pieces for them.
Ever hear of Fox News? Find your neighborhood lefty and ask them what they think about Fox News. Just be sure to be ready for a healthy helping of hate to be heaped out, pressed down, and heaped on again. Just imagine how they would react if a real conservative news network were to start broadcasting! (I call Fox RINO News)
So where does that leave us? If the papers continue to report lefty news...conservatives by and large won't buy their paper, and lefties will continue to use Craig's List, and the papers will continue their downward spiral.
If they throw conservatives a bone, the lefties start frothing at the mouth.
Where does that leave us? I don't really know. I suspect that it will give citizen journalists a foot in the door and leverage to squeeze out the regional and perhaps even the local papers. Anyway, I do get a kick out of lefties attacking their own institutions, though. Keep the popcorn coming!
To submit releases for publication, email me here. This includes Guest Commentaries. If you have a photo that you wish me to use with your press release or article, please send it to me, otherwise I'll use whatever I feel best fits your article.
Letters to the Editor
Send Letters to the Editor to editor@MaconMedia. Limit is one submission every seven days. You may include photos, video or audio. Submissions will be edited for vulgarity or similar reasons. Limit submissions to less than 10,000 words. LOL
For a quicker response, send me a message on Twitter or add me to a circle on Google Plus and send it just to me.
If you have been sending me press releases via my private email address, that will continue to work just fine. The Twitter or Google+ account will get my attention quicker.
NON PROFIT OR CIVIC EVENTS
Macon Media will promote nonprofit or civic events if contacted by an organizer of the event. This includes rallies, protests, community forums, and parades. Messeanger Link http://m.me/MaconMediaNews
If you're of a mind, and can afford it, a dollar a month (or more) from enough people will make a huge difference in improving the quality of coverage of local meetings and events, as well as allowing remote weather stations and weather cams to be deployed throughout the county that you will be able to access online.
Currently, 20 people have pledged $99 a month. This is a tremendous help. Please visit www.patreon.com/MaconMedia for more information on how to contribute.
Businesses can underwrite this coverage by day sponsorships, surplus equipment donations, etc. Inquire at editor@maconmedia.com for more information.
Donations accepted for the purpose of supporting this blog and activities related to improving it's operations and my coverage of local festivals and local government meetings.
Posts
