The Enquirer Invisibler: An Equal Opportunity Ignorer
By now it’s clear that the Enquirer Invisibler doesn’t care that what was presented to them, and what they essentially reported, as a fair, open, and honest process by the Hamilton County GOP Executive Committee at its endorsement meeting on February 9 was shown to be anything but that on Monday, with the documentation to prove it.
But getting played by the local GOP is nothing compared to the fact that there was not a single word in the paper’s print edition on Saturday, nor has there been anything at its “Politics Extra” blog, about the explosive and well-documented charges, originally reported in Mother Jones roughly 40 hours ago, that the state and/or national Democratic Party derailed Paul Hackett’s US Senate run in Ohio by conducting a whisper campaign that he committed war crimes during his service in Iraq.
So The Invisibler is an equal-opportunity ignorer. Short of starting up another paper or a comprehensive online equivalent, nothing can be done to change that. To find out what’s really going on in local and Ohio politics, we’ll just have to get used to working harder than we should have to by going to the other newspapers in the state and visiting the various blogs. It’s the Invisibler’s loss — if they care. A blogger with a story to break will have to figure out how to work around the Invisibler, and forget about working through it.
The sad thing is that in the Information Age, the casual news consumer in Greater Cincinnati is, in my opinion, less well served by its local mainstream media in print, radio, and television than during any time I can recall.
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UPDATE: An Instapundit comment on the Cartoon Jihad has direct applicability to the Enquirer’s non-performance, especially on the Hackett war-crimes whispers, which may represent the dirtiest intraparty campaign trick ever (anyone who can cite a worse one, e-mail me):
They keep forgetting that it’s their job to tell us stuff, not to decide what we shouldn’t be told.
Someone suggested that the aggressive Bush takeout of McCain in South Carolina on values issues in 2000 might be comparable. Nope — not even in the same zip code.
Also in 2000, David Hackworth, though this isn’t documented at his Wiki entry, went on mid-level conservative talk shows and wrote a few columns (one at World Net Daily) accusing McCain of committing treason while he was captive in North Vietnam. No GOP presidential candidate made any use of the claims of Hackworth, who died in May 2005.
