There are times I am left thinking that the most ardent follower of this blog and Clark County Politics blog is none other than Columbian Editor Lou Brancaccio, who although relegates us to a realm of distant obscurity as well as the blame for the local paper of record seeing decreasing subscriptions rates, often targets us in his Saturday Press Talk column.
Such is the case in his latest Saturday column that appears today, Sunday: A fun blog and conspiracies where two thirds of the column is devoted to “correcting” posts earlier this week exposing the papers obvious bias, The Columbian: Busted Again On Their Pro-Democrat Bias on this blog and Remember the democrats lying over Boldt getting booted out of the GOP? over on Clark County Politics where we shed some light on the bias of the Columbian favoring Democrats and a few missing paragraphs in an AP story showing a darker underside of the Democrat Party they claim does not exist.
About an hour after the posts were put up, the missing paragraphs appeared in an updated version of the Columbian’s article as was acknowledged in my earlier post.
With all of the things happening in today’s world, I find it curious, considering we bloggers are considered to be so inconsequential to the community that the Editor of the so called largest newspaper in Southwest Washington would expend as much energy as he does countering what we write and doing what I will now call, with thanks to Google Translate the Brancaccio Mescolare (shuffle).
After brief coverage of a fun local blog by “Community conquistadors Jim Mains and Gary Bock,” the Vancouver Side, Brancaccio launches into his revelation of the “Conspiracy theory” we bloggers exposed earlier this week of the “missing parapgraphs.”
We might better label the effort as “coprire il culo.” Or in our English, “cover your ass.”
As we showed in the posts, the Columbian ran several articles condemning the local Republican Party for “sanctioning” soon to be former County Commissioner Marc Boldt including denials by the Democrat Party that they would ever do the same thing.
The missing paragraphs consisted of words of condemnation from Washington State Democrat Party Chair Dwight Pelz condemning and indicating he no longer considered two Democrats, Rodney Tom and Tim Sheldon to be Democrats since they have joined with Republicans to form what they label a “philosophical Majority” in the state legislature to get the two parties working together to solve our many problems.
Brancaccio seems to take exception to our indicating the paragraphs were “edited out,” saying he contacted the Associated Press to ask and lo and behold, we read now that the section not initially seen in the Columbian article were not included in the original AP feed they ran at 10:53 AM on December 10, 2012 and edited at 11:56 AM.
Brancaccio states,
“The original story we ran made no mention of what the Senate Democrats were thinking of these rogue Democrats siding with the Republicans. And some of my conservative Internet friends found a state wire story that noted the Democratic hierarchy would — indeed — disown them.”
I saw the Columbian’s article in the early afternoon and thought little of it until I saw in the Oregonian, Leader of Washington State Democrats disowns 2 senators working with GOP posted at 2:30 PM, and updated at 2:33 PM.
I had already put up a post on a Press Release sent to me from State Senator Don Benton and referenced the AP feed article that was in the Olympian at 11:35 AM. Since the Olympian does not time stamp their articles, I cannot verify what time that day they posted it, but I did notice after seeing the Oregonian article that the Olympian’s article showed those “missing paragrpahs” where the Columbian did not.
Looking around some more I found that the Seattle PI ran it at 2:39 PM.
The Kitsap Sun ran it at 10:37 AM. with an update at 2:36 PM.
MYNorthwest.com posted it at 2:32 PM.
It was even referenced on the far left website Democratic Underground at 2:40 PM.
Far from my finding that “a state wire story” had the full article, I found the full wire story in several places, but not the Columbian. I wrote and posted the above referenced post at 6:49 PM when the Columbian’s article still did not include the paragraphs.
A 7:44 PM update to the Columbian’s article included the missing paragraphs.
Brancaccio, after stating the premise of our posts was “completely false” now says,
“Here’s what happened:”
Today, stories continually evolve on the Web. Early stories on the Internet are often incomplete.
Because we didn’t write this story — again, it was from the wire services — I wanted to make sure I had this right. So I spoke to Chris Grygiel, the Associated Press’ state news editor. He said I had the facts correct.
“The version that moved (early in the day) was filed during the press conference, so it didn’t yet have comment from Dems.”
Then, later in the afternoon — several hours after the first version ran — it “added comment from the Democratic Party disowning the two Democrats,” he said.
Unlike Brancaccio, I’ll give him benefit of doubt since the Oregonian still has a version without the paragraphs, choosing to run those paragraphs separately. So I have little doubt the AP’s initial release did not include those paragraphs.
But, “several hours later?” No, as can be seen in all of the other media outlets that ran the full AP article in the early afternoon. Are we seriously to believe that the AP sent an updated to other media outlets hours before they sent it to the Columbian?
I have a hard time with that considering that the Columbian did update their article almost a full hour after the post showing they did not have it up on their site.
I will admit I might be mistaken on their “editing it out” of the original article, but I stand behind they did not have it included until an hour after it was revealed on our blogs. Apparently they were not in a hurry to update the story in a timely manner.
Why did the Columbian take 5 hours longer to update their article, and only did so after blogs revealed it, when so many other media outlets in the state ran it in the early afternoon? Was it deliberate or just inattention to updates? Don’t they have someone to monitor their wire feeds?
Lou Brancaccio can dance around it all he wants, label us conspiracists if he chooses and condescend to us with
“Honestly, I don’t blame my friends on the Internet. They really do the best they can with the information they have available. But every once in a while, it’s good to show the real story behind the story.”
It doesn’t change the fact that we saw accurate updates in other state media hours before the Columbian decided to chime in and finally update an article to include words that clearly showed the Columbian’s favored Democrats act no different than do the Republicans they condemned.
Maybe I shouldn’t be too harsh on Brancaccio. After all, how can we expect them to stay on top of story feeds when much of the day seems spent on monitoring blogs nobody reads in order to know when to “coprire il culo.”
