Friday, February 25, 2011

Update on letters in The Ostrich

We have breaking news on the post of earlier today.

Apparently, either the editors of our beloved award-winning local newspaper follow Other Side, or serendipity resulted in a response to our submission of Tuesday mere hours after our essay on the letters of Monday, February 21st appeared today.

Said editors indicated that our letter would not be published.  Color us shocked.  And aghast.  And humiliated.  What, are we not up to Paul Krugman standards of bloviation, hyperbole, and demagoguery?

The rationale they provided falls into the good news – bad news domain.  The good news is that they assert our suggestion that they didn’t vet the letters to be untrue.  The bad news is that if they in fact vetted these letters, we have a whole new dimension of concern about the rigor of their pursuit of truth as they seek to keep us ‘well informed.’

We went back to read the letters as they appeared, just to make sure we hadn’t overstepped our own editorial bounds of propriety.

To be clear, Dexter Kamilewicz asserts that if you set Defense spending and Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid aside, the rest of federal government gets by on 5% of total federal spending.  And the Kehoe-Ostensens declare that AEGIS Destroyers kill indiscriminately, or more to the point, that those who operate them do.

We invite the editors of our local award winning newspaper to post the substantiation of the letter writer’s claims here.  Isn’t that part of living up to their claim of being a ‘government watchdog?’  And we won’t count it as part of their monthly word limit in our publication.

We consider the offer proof of our commitment to provide you with the facts, as best we can dig them up.

Not that it’s necessary to do so, you understand.  That tradition died many years ago in the mainstream media world.

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