News About the News
Here is the news about the News Guy that was originally going to be made public last week, but got delayed because…well, you know how these things are.
As the perspicacious among you have no doubt already noticed (and the rest of you-you know who you are!-get sharp) a new icon has appeared on the Newsguy page.
Look up and over to the right, just to the right of the fedora with the press pass. It’s a link to the News Guy’s new partner, the Stowe Reporter, the weekly that covers Stowe and its Lamoille County environs.
If you live around there, give it a click.
Or if you just want to know what’s happening in and around Stowe. And maybe even if you’re not that interested in Stowe. A couple of weeks ago, for instance, the Reporter had a story that should have been (but, we will not be shocked to learn, was not) picked up by the state’s daily newspapers. It turns out that, at least in the Morrisville Office of the Department of Children and Families, the number of children in foster care has gone up 57 percent in five years. That ought to be statewide news.
So the News Guy is pleased to be entering into a partnership with the Stowe Reporter. We’re linking to its online version, which in turn is linking to us.
Here’s what’s in it for us (Who knows what’s in it for them? The folks there will have to speak for themselves): The arrangement gives the News Guy more exposure in the Stowe area, and in fact several new subscribers from that part of the state have recently signed on. The Reporter has skills that the News Guy lacks. It knows how to promote itself, and therefore presumably its partners. It knows how to sell advertising, from which the News Guy might someday benefit.
(But not yet, and, in all likelihood, minimally. Meaning donations are still welcome, the News Guy having not attained the long-sought financial Nirvana known as breaking even. Look below the “Stowe Reporter” link, under “pages,” and find “donate.” Just click. It’s easy).
Whatever happens financially, journalistically this is an exciting and positive development for this web site, which will nonetheless strive to avoid whatever dangers might arise from becoming respectable.
Any doubts that the News Guy needs help should have been extinguished by careful readers of last Friday’s post (just below), which mentioned “the spruce and fur forests so important to northern New England,” and noted that they mightbe replaced by maple and “beach” trees.
Interesting concept, the “fur forest.” It would, presumably, be made up of trees from which one could harvest the kind of material now found only on mink, otter, beaver, and similar beasts. Great! Then we wouldn’t have to kill these creatures for their pelts. The development of fur forests would please the animal rights crowd.
For the nonce, however, those who want these furs will have to get them from the skins of dead animals, while the rest of us continue to live among spruce and fir trees.
There are beach trees. They are trees that grow along the beach. The trees that threaten to replace the firs and spruce, though, are beech trees.
That same post began by talking about the kind of world we would all leave to our “descendents.” To the purists among us, you are descendent when you are walking down the stairs. You are your grandmother’s descendant, even when you are walking up the stairs.
The dictionary (American Heritage Second College edition) is less finicky, regarding either spelling as a correct variant of either word. So this was not, strictly speaking, an error.
But you know what? The dictionary is insufficiently finicky here. Distinctions should be maintained. From now on in this space, progeny will be known as descendants, not descendents.
Any discussion of journalistic errors in this state this day is compelled to deal with the really bad story that lead the Burlington Free Press Saturday.
This story was B-A-D Bad, with a capital B. And a capital A-D, too. It was not good. It was…well, you’d have to call it…the right word would be bad. It wasn’t good. It was a bad story.
Many of you no doubt read it. The story explained that many Vermonters were buying carbolic acid (phenol) because it was considered the most effective weapon to use against invaders from the planet Zelfugghhia, hordes of whom were expected any day now.
Oh, no, wait a minute. That wasn’t it. Sometimes we get confused.
Actually, the story was about how Vermonters, like Americans elsewhere, were buying more guns and ammunition because they think President Barack Obama plans to make it more difficult, if not impossible, for them to buy guns and ammunition.
True, and it wasn’t as though reporter Matt Ryan got anything wrong. He accurately quoted gun shop owners and he cited the statistics on background checks indicating that gun and purchases have been rising.
Fine. But here is what else belonged in the story: The plain fact that the likelihood that Obama (or anyone else) is about to outlaw guns is roughly comparable to an invasion by creatures from the planet Zelfugghhia.
In fact, the story presented a wonderful (but ignored) opportunity for the Free Press to convey a civics lesson, explaining to these gun-buyers how America works.
Obama, you see, is merely the president. He can propose laws. He can not promulgate them. Only Congress can pass laws, and it can not do so secretly. Nor can Obama propose them secretly. He can’t file legislation. Only members of Congress can do that. So Obama or someone on his staff would have to urge one of those members to introduce a bill. If he did, we would all know about it. He has not.
Right now, there are 11 bills in Congress relating to guns. Only four (three sponsored by Democrats, one by a Republican) tighten restrictions on gun ownership. None of those four has gotten out of committee.
That means they ain’t goin’ nowhere.
Nor has the Obama Administration endorsed any of them.
Absent this information, the story fails to be truthful. It is, then, dishonest.
Were it actually honest (as opposed to merely being not dishonest), it would also have dealt with the political efforts designed to make some people think that Obama is trying to take away their guns, and the serious (in some cases fatal) consequences of these efforts.
In what is obviously a step to keep their members riled up and contributing, organizations such as the National Rifle Association and Gun Owners of America have been – to put it mildly – exaggerating Obama’s hostility to gun ownership and owners.
The NRA screed is excessive but not totally irrational. A an Illinois State Senator, Obama was a stronger advocate of gun control than he is now. With no political considerations, he might revert to that viewpoint. But of course there are political considerations, and at any rate he never supported banning guns altogether.
The Gun Owners of America, on the other hand, are so irrational that they might be worrying about that invasion from the planet Zelfugghhia. At one point their web site charges that the Inter-American Convention Against the Illicit Manufacturing and Trafficking in Firearms, Ammunition, Explosives, and Other Related Materials, designed to prevent drug smugglers from transporting weapons across national boundaries in the hemisphere, would somehow outlaw gun clubs.
Of course the folks on the other side of this debate, the pro-gun control set, also like to rile up its members to keep the contributions coming. So far, though, their efforts have not had any spillover effect. But the gun lobby’s excesses may have contributed, if indirectly, to the murder in Pittsburgh in April of three police officers, allegedly by someone who feared a government plot to take away his guns,
All that should have been in the story.
For the record, because people get so intense about the gun issue and are so quick to pigeon-hole anyone who comments on it, the News Guy has always held that law-abiding citizens have a right to own guns, and that hunting is a socially and environmentally healthy pursuit, which ought to be encouraged.
He just doesn’t like bad journalism.
