For years, The Ostrich and its sister award winning newspapers have fancied themselves “government watchdogs,” digging, investigating, tracking, analyzing, and reporting to keep us safe from the over-reach of government. And supposedly ensuring that malfeasance, dereliction of duty, dishonesty, corruption, cronyism, waste, and self-glorification are minimized; and that unbridled ambition is exposed.
Surprisingly, we’ve yet to encounter a trench-coat clad, fedora wearing, cigarette smoking reporter from The Ostrich, or any other paper, for that matter, hanging around in all the right places, and lots of the wrong ones, seeking out “the rest of the story.”
A perfect example of The Ostrich’s utter failure to live up to their legendary self-view is how they seemed to be out to lunch for the entire Oxford Aviation/MRRA episode. Until such time, that is, as they turned into a lapdog for F. Lee Bailey, when he provided them a copy of his letter bailing out on his attempt to apply lipstick to the Oxford Oinker. This spawned the “willfully uninformed” editorial, which in turn led to us creating their nickname.
Rampant speculation on motives and connections invites itself to this discussion, but it won’t get a seat at our table today.
Instead, we have great news! Maine Watchdog, which can be found at Maine.Watchdog.org, is now on the beat, and not a moment too soon, given Maine’s target-rich environment.
Stephan Burklin, who heads the operation, describes the service as follows:
Maine Watchdog is a news website dedicated to in-depth and investigative journalism.
Its mission is two-fold: 1) to uncover waste and abuse at the local and state level and 2) to promote government transparency so as to hold government officials and institutions accountable.
Wow! Great ideas; you’d think somebody would already have been doing this, wouldn’t you.
A perfect example of MaineWatchdog’s breakthrough efforts is the Chellie Pingree private jet story they broke a few weeks ago. If you haven’t seen the clip that began it all, here it is, and don’t miss the red carpet:
The revelation has sparked quite a to-do for our incumbent Congresswoman, who suddenly remembered that she has been engaged to the wealthy “owner” of the plane for some years now. The story has real legs, as they say in media.
You can see the entire MaineWatchdog story here.
In closing, you can sign up on their web site for email updates, and I hope you will.
And from now on, watch out whose airplane you jet-set around in. Unless you can arrange for Poppy to come along for an “in-air interview.”
PS: Here’s just one example of those “legs” I was talking about, which now reach as far south as Massachusetts:
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