More critical thinking, Corey Hutchins, on Colorado new media?

Especially about a hasbara-lying Zionist sack of shit? 

I have followed Hutchins' Substack, Inside the News in Colorado, for about three years. I came across it when noticing all the Berliner-like newspapers on the west side of the Rockies on the I-70 corridor out to the Western Slope, and learned more via him.

Anyway, he's fairly solid fairly often, but sometimes a bit of a miss.

Take his Aug. 8 issue, Five New Colorado Niche Publications. One of them is "The Shomer," on Beehiv. Purports to hunt out antisemitism, but the "about" makes it pretty clear that David Flomberg deliberately swings a big butterfly net to catch anti-Zionism in his antisemitic net.

Flomberg first denies that Israel is committing genocide. And, while he doesn't repeat the mass rape allegations against Hamas (why not?) he does overblow other issues related to Oct. 7, 2023. He of course doesn't tell you that the government of Israel helped create Hamas. 

He DOES, and did at his previous stop, the Colorado Times Reporter, in his last piece, repeat Eretz Israel bullshit:

“Anti-Zionism isn’t antisemitism!” they [liberals, versus traditional right-wing antisemites] proclaim loudly and proudly, reminding everyone within earshot how many Jewish friends they have who “also” hate the State of Israel, just like they do! “We denounce antisemitism in all its forms!” they’ll remind us in the same breath as they educate us on why Jews have no right to self-determination in their ancestral homeland.

There you are. 

And correct the strikethrough above. In a previous piece at the CTR, he repeats the mass rape bullshit too, from August 2025, after they'd been refuted:

I had a close friend, a woman who had been the victim of sexual violence on multiple occasions. She’s a fierce and outspoken feminist who I admired for her courage and willingness to share her personal stories. And yet, when there was a tidal wave of propaganda flooding social media denying the accounts of women who came forward after the attack, she didn’t bat an eye. She rushed to defend Hamas, embracing the lies; she demand I personally provide her with video evidence of these “so-called rapes.” I was stunned. And it was far from an anomalous experience. It took nearly two years for the United Nations to acknowledge sexual violence was wielded in the Oct. 7 attack by Hamas and has been inflicted on many hostages since. And in that time, the prevailing sentiment I witnessed in the pro-Palestine movement and its associated Leftist spaces was: “Believe all women. Unless they’re Jews.”

Lying sack of shit. Indeed, just two months after he wrote that piece, Mondoweiss demolished the claims behind it, including the UN work. Indeed, just TWO MONTHS after the Hamas insurgency, Mondoweiss said there was no evidence for this claim.

Sadly, per his editorial tagline there:

David Flomberg is a 7-Time Society of Professional Journalists Award Winner for his editorial and feature writing over the 20+ years he’s been covering Colorado and beyond. His credits include Yellow Scene Magazine, Westword, Boulder Weekly, Downbeat Jazz Magazine, and the Rocky Mountain News, where he was a columnist for the final 7 years of its run.

He has a journalism history and presumably people willing to not research the facts. 

This spring in the CTR, he had a gaslighting definition, full column version of Zionism and anti-Zionism. While he doesn't engage in pseudo-etymology about the name "Palestinian" in that piece, he does use other Zionist tropes about shoving them to the back of the bus.

Here, he claims anti-Zionists try to impose collective guilt on all Jews for actions of the state of Israel. Bullshit in two ways. First, that's what Israel does with Palestinians, so it's projectionism. Section, I certainly don't. And anti-Zionist Jews, nowhere mentioned by him, certainly don't. 

Scratch that, too, as he does mention them in another piece, complete with more gaslighting and strawmanning:

[I]t’s further exacerbated by Jews who are all-too willing to tokenize themselves as “anti-Zionist” and then are trotted out by pro-Palestinian organizations as a “gotcha!” in their anti-Zionism campaigns. And while the numbers of these self-tokenizing Jews are a fraction of the world’s Jewish population, they are highly visible, distorting the perception of uneducated onlookers and making anti-Zionists feel as though their position must be valid because some Jews support it.

Ye fucking gads. "Tokenize" is of course "othering."

Elsewhere, he accuses Palestinians of culturally appropriating the sudra into the keffiyeh. Actually, per Wiki's piece on it, the keffiyeh only largely replaced the fez in the 20th century. As for the sudra itself? Wiki reminds us that the name comes from the Koine Greek "σουδάριον" which in turn comes from the classical Latin "sūdārium." Oops. It adds that the Mishnaic and early-Talmudic era sudra was not worn the same way as a keffiyah, and also that headdresses are attested in the greater Middle East as far back as 2600 BCE. I await Flonberg claiming modern Iraq, as successor to ancient Babylon, is actually part of Eretz Israel.

Circulation "fraud" by Hearst?

 I put the "fraud" in scare quotes because:

First, even in the old Audit Bureau of Circulation days, newspapers cheated and;

Second, annual postal statements aren't notified and have only a requirement to certify that, if you're not a free throw, and are on a second class not third class permit, at least 50 percent of your copies have some charge.

With that said ...

I have heard, secondhand, that Hearst is inserting print copies of its weekly Jasper (Texas) News-Boy in the Beaumont Enterprise and using Beaumont's circ to count for Jasper's.

I do know Jasper does not have a separate website now and instead rolls to a webpage on the Enterprise. 

I'm surprised Cox didn't think about this with Pflugerville and other regional outposts off the Austin Stateless; I do know it did what Hearst did and folded it, Round Rock and Bastrop's websites, and social media sites, into the Stateless even before selling to Craphouse. Maybe they WERE doing this as well. Since Hearst now owns the Stateless, it would have gotten the idea from there.

Plus ça change? 

In any case, since Chris Tomlinson is no longer on Shitter, I don't have to worry about him running flak for Hearst any more. (Surprisingly, the person who told me this didn't know Hearst had bought the Snooze.) 

Robert Wilonsky is back in the journalism saddle

 I knew he had been battling kidney cancer, but didn't realize he had recovered so well as to have returned to the Snooze a full year ago. The Texas Observer reports, as of mid-June.

Personally, I wish he were back at the Dallas Observer. They could surely use another older presence. 

Don't pee on my leg and tell me it's raining when you cut pages

About six weeks ago, I noted here that the Gainesville (non-Daily, change your masthead) Register was smarter than the Denton Record-Chronicle by ditching running daily comics, puzzles, advice columns, etc. for three of the six non-Sunday days each week in its two print editions.

Well, now, on to that headline.

In a house editorial in its June 16 issue, the paper says "we miss the comics, too."

Fine.

Then, we get a line of PR bullshit that I assume is CNHI-wide. (Teh Google confirms.)

They said getting rid of them meant more local news.

Bullshit.

What it means is that it LOOKS like more local news because the same amount of local news is part of a newspaper with two fewer pages.

On the front page of the Register, in the same issue, for example? A groundbreaking for a NEW SIDEWALK, a Gainesville City Council story about ongoing discussion of review of the city charter and possible amendments, and ...

A Texas Tribune story about how the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality was in the process of setting standards for uses of fracking wastewater. Given that there's no fracking done in the moderate amount of oil and gas drilling in the area, that's irrelevant. They had a state Extension Service story about summer foods, on an inside page, that would have been more appropriate up front.

Oh, other than Reader's Choice "vote for us" ads, the normal almost-nothing on local ads. And, most of those were only 2x3. One one-quarter page, a back page of all 2x3 and that was it. 

Gainesville wins third for doing nothing

 At TPA's Better Newspaper Contest, the Register took third for sports coverage, primarily due to Jason Campbell's photos about Muenster's football title.

I had as many or more photos, plus more in-depth coverage, and coverage of other sports the Register basically does nothing about, and I didn't even place.

(It's not made easier by the fact that GV probably only had 4-5 newspapers in its circ class even enter.) 

SMH. 

So who's telling the journalistic truth about Palestinian journalists?

Mondoweiss, the Dissident and others have excoriated Committee to Protect Journalists for removing certain Palestinian journalists killed in Gaza from their list of journalists.

CPJ has responded in a Twitter thread. 

Before I get into the details, two notes.

One, not all Palestinian journalists have been removed by CPJ. Only those who were affiliated, officially, with Hamas or Palestinian Jihad, and actually in combat, it says in that thread.

Two, has CPJ removed any Israeli journalists in the past? It says it has removed three when they were "not on assignment" when killed. No further information provided.

Third? Wiki's page on CPJ notes controversy a couple of years ago when it killed its Global Impunity Index. On the other hand? A link there from Arab News notes that CPJ has previously cited international organizations that call what's happening in Gaza a genocide? 

So, it's complicated.

Would the allegations have been made with a different executive director than the Jewish Jodie Ginsburg? I don't know. There are a few people with Jewish-appearing names on its board, but plenty without. And, Dave Marash, one of its advisors, once worked for Al-Jazeera English, albeit while leaving two years later, but then defending it again three years after that.

Otherwise, you have a modest set of board members of advisors outside the Anglosphere. Julie Owono, from Cameroon and France, is executive of Internet without Borders. On the other hand, she's been on Meta's, aka Facebook's, Oversight Board since it was created in 2020 and so should be seen as at least potentially a Western sellout. Otherwise, there's Phil Chetwynd, news director of Agence-France Press and himself British, and Italian national Alessandra Galloni of Reuters, the board has zero presence outside the Anglosphere, and about zero presence outside of traditional-ish media outlets.

The issue is complicated, in other words.

That said, the CPJ has opened the door for Zionist liars to claim that Israel doesn't kill journalists. I reminded them of Shireen Abu Akleh. 

And that that said, in relation to that, CPJ has opened the door for Israel to redouble its "shoot first, ask questions later" about Palestinian journalists. The Mondoweiss piece notes that basically EVERY Israeli journalist has had IDF service. The rare exception, if there is one, would be an ultra-Orthodox Jew who dodged the draft. 

Life is full of shades of gray. This is one of them. I oppose the genocide in Gaza and note that CPJ has called it out. I wish they had provided more information about the three Israeli journalists and why they were removed; it might have quieted some critics. But, CPJ appears to be being consistent, setting aside concerns about the Global Impunity Index.

The Denton Record Chronicle is now officially worse than the Gainesville Register

At least on print editorial management.

The Register, about six weeks ago, finally junked the idea of running three days worth of comics and other lifestyles stuff in each of its two semiweekly issues. Instead, it cut down to one page of puzzles and lifestyle stuff while keeping comics on its website.

That's not perfect, as people who really want comics, and beyond the ones you may have there (the print edition version in the past was slim) can find various free or paid online sites, but it's a good start.

The DRC, which cut fairly quickly through all the stages from seven-day daily down to weekly, not semiweekly, in the year of COVID, still isn't there.

I looked at an issue recently in a library, after having not peeked in months.

The ridiculousness is actually worse.

They are still running comics and all. But? NOT six days. BUT, not one or two days of non-comics lifestyles either.

Instead, it's four days a week, at least in the issue I looked at, even though there are six days outside of Sunday in the seven-day print week and outside of color Sunday comics in the former seven-day print world.

Ad hole still sucks.

Throw out four-plus pages of Readers' Choice / Best Of tout ads, which surely are sold to businesses on a discount rate, unless there's a bunch of dumb Denton businesses there. (Some online-only publication, here's your chance to cut in, by the way.)

Throwing them out, and the total page count with that? Twenty pages.

Of that? Five pages is ad hole. Of THAT? Three pages is classy. You could be better on classy. You should be better on ROP.

Of course, if I toss four pages of comics et al, if I cut to two, you're 5/18, which is 27.5 percent instead of 25. Or toss comics entirely and you're 5/16, which is a bit over 30 percent.

Or if we count your Readers' Choice at 50 percent, but the space at 100 percent, you're 7/24, which is back under 30 percent even with the goose of Readers' Choice. 

And, while you're not asking for my advice? While I'm here, get rid of the daily e-edition. The Register did that too. Unless you're the Arkansas Democrat handing out iPads to e-reader subscribers and otherwise getting aggressive in promoting it, it's a waste of time.