Dishonest Steve Everley and the publisher, Steve Fountain, who sought him out

Another thing that I won't miss about my stint at Granite Publications is my last publisher at my last paper there.

Steve Fountain had SOME good ideas as a publisher, (and at least a few STUPID ones) and on some aspects of editing/managing editing was good, but on others?

Politically biased.

I wrote a piece about fracking earthquakes in the Timpson, Texas, area, as a follow-up to a Shelby County Commissioners' Court meeting. Here it is, or was, until ownership change and link rot. Nowhere did I say "fracking causes all earthquakes." Nor did I even say "all waste water from oil (or gas) wells is fracking waste." I did say, in the lede:

Earthquakes due to underground injection of wastewater from fracking for oil or gas production has become more problematic across Texas, including in Shelby County.

And I said that for a simple reason. Name me a well today that is NOT fracked. (A few shallow wells may not be, but if it's a major operation, or of course a re-entry, it's fracked.)

I was told by Mr. Fountain that I was editorializing. Please.

I was then told that a "Steve Everley" was a good, neutral source to use in the future.

I thought I had heard that name before, and, voila!

Steve Everley is Manager of Policy Research at American Solutions and a contributing author to To Save America: Stopping Obama’s Secular-Socialist Machine by Newt Gingrich. Prior to joining American Solutions, Everley worked as a research assistant at the American Enterprise Institute. He graduated summa cum laude from the University of Kansas and attended graduate school at the University of Southern California. 

Erm, yes, that's a "neutral source," someone writing for Townhall and calling Obama both a secularist and a socialist, when he's neither.

Specific logical flaws in Everley's thinking can be found here, in a piece he wrote opposing the Denton fracking ban.

More Dishonest Everley here in attacking Patagonia.

Now, Mr. Fountain moved to East Texas from the fracking hotbed of northern Pennsylvania. Even though he was out of the newspaper biz, I have no doubt he was not detached from the political thought biz, and had probably read Everley before up there.

His LinkedIn profile proves that. Freelance writing for the Family Policy Alliance, a religious right group, and expressly, the 501(c)(4) advocacy arm of Focus on the Family? And, press secretary to a right-wing Pennsylvania Congressional candidate? (And one who is not only a bit of a theocrat, but also a believer in the success gospel, it would seem.) Nooo, Steve Everley's name most definitely did not come out of nowhere.

Nice try, and don't ever lecture me again about "editorializing," should we meet again. In addition to that comment itself, beyond the content, it felt to me like it was expressed in a somewhat condescending way. I've heard condescension enough that I know what it is.

Beyond that, I wish I had studied this more when or before he was hired. His current return to newspapers is not his second, it seems, but his third time around.

Besides, Mr. Fountain, the government back in your previous state of Pennsylvania says fracking does cause some quakes. And, even in quakes due to wastewater injection, fracked wells produce more of it than unfracked ones; per the USGS, how much more varies from well to well. 

And, as of February, the first fracking-related quake in Pennsylvania was confirmed. And, fracking, not fracking wastewater disposal.

And as of October 2019? TEXAS' own state-established monitor admits fracking causes earthquakes. Shock me that Everley is quoted in that piece with some spin-doctoring.

And now, here in Tejas, The Academy of Medicine, Engineering and Science of Texas has weighed in with detail on fracking wastewater causing quakes — and pollution from fracking, including noise pollution, not just air and water pollution.

And, Texas Vox further has your number, Mr. Fountain.

AND, wastewater injection can continue to cause quakes at least seven years later.

Mr. Fountain had the right as a publisher of a newspaper, to tell me not to write further columns on that subject. Or to write one of his own. 

However, he did not have the journalistic right to claim I was editorializing when I was not.

Meanwhile, you're now in Alpine, as the hydrocarbon haze from fracking drifts closer and closer to your Big Bend area mountainous perch.

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There's more than this, though.

Hindsight, looking back on the issues of the last few months before I was downsized, indicate to me that Mr. Fountain is a Grade A user of other people.

I think he was crunching financials at the Center paper from the time of his interviews and already eyeballing getting rid of me. Several "out of the loop" events, in hindsight, would seem to attest to that. He needed me around enough to get a sports editor hired and get us through football season. Then, I was gone. (And, after the new sports editor got the paper through basketball and other winter sports, he was gone.)

Hindsight is 20-20, and often a bitch, as well.

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I had originally posted this about a year ago, then hauled it down for a variety of reasons. I decided it's air-dried long enough, I'm putting it back up. I'm also curious if Mr. Fountain, whose conservativism had one foot in the Big Biz and deregulation quasi-libertarian side, but the other firmly in the religious right side, has sucked it up and kisses Trump's tuchis hypocritically, or whether he had some honesty.