Gainesville Register hits new low

I thought their regional editor, since they no longer have a local editor, has more brains than this, but I stand corrected.

In the ongoing saga of 235th District Court Judge Janelle Haverkamp, defense attorney Michael Lassiter's filing of a writ of habeas corpus for client Michael Newberry, district attorney John Warren signing off on that writ, visiting judge Lee Gabriel officially recommending to the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals that it order a new trial for Newberry, and Eighth Judicial Administrative District presiding judge David Evans ordering a mandatory recusal of Haverkamp from active and future criminal cases brought by Warren ...

Last week, county judge John Roane decided he had to row his oar.

He wrote a LONG open letter to all local media. The last two paragraphs not only threw Warren, and also County Attorney Ed Zielinski, under the proverbial bus, they had Roane at least approaching, if not sticking his toes over the border of, a certain legal issue.

The local radio station, which really doesn't do news reporting, posted the letter in full on its Facebook page an hour after it came out.

The local shopper-plus paper, which got the letter before its press deadline, unless that deadline has been moved up with a change in its printers, did not. (We will see if it runs this week.)

The CNHI-owned Register, currently a semiweekly in print?

It not only ran the letter in full, it also referenced it in a news story.

The Register does not have a local editor, and has not for almost a year. Instead, it has a regional editor overseeing the CNHI papers in Cleburne and Weatherford as well as Gainesville. Even before Sally Sexton took over Gainesville, she — and CHNI in general in this area — were stretched so thin that (Aledo) Community News owner Randy Keck started an online-only competitor to Weatherford.

The Register has a local staff writer, a Gainesville native in their first journalism job out of college with no journalism degree, whom the regional editor wouldn't allow to touch anything on the matters at hand.

There's additional issues, which happen when you have non-local editors.

There's a number of backstory issues behind Roane's letter, among them that his claims to be trying to mediate two sides aren't true, per comments that may be running around elsewhere. There's also backstory behind the county's would-be original legal contract for a law firm to write an amicus brief for Haverkamp. But, nobody is talking off the record to a rookie reporter, and don't have the relationship with a non-local editor to do that. I don't know if anybody is doing that with either the reporter or the owner of the shopper-plus.

Anyway, I am not linking to any Register coverage nor quoting from Roane's letter.

AP source anonmyity gets ridiculous

Here's the latest. On political strategy for a presidential race that won't have its first semi-binding vote for nine months .... granting campaign aides anonymity to "leak" about their boss's campaign plans.

Allies and aides who outlined the path that Romney is charting to the nomination spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to publically discuss private strategy sessions.

Ridiculous. "Traditional media" gets worse at this all the time.

Oh, and Philip Elliott of the AP, "publically" is NOT a word. "Publicly" is.

Anonymous sourcing means 'tweaked' quotes

Ed Cohen raises another valid concern about the rise of anonymous comments in BOTH old and new media. And that is that anonymous comments usually have the commenter "tweaking" the quote before it sees the light of day.

In other words, BOTH old AND new media that use anonymous sources are becoming ever more propaganda by the day.

Anonymous sourcing: ain't just the MSM

Glenn Greenwald rightly bemoans what seems to be a worsening of the use of anonymous sourcing in inside-the-Beltway reporting.

But, as I e-mailed him, this isn't just a "mainstream media" phenomenon.

I’ll hold out Talking Points Memo as a prime example, since it developed from “just a blog” into doing its own news reporting.

A couple of months ago, for example (sorry, don’t have link), one of its staff reported the “latest” on Obama’s heath care push, with a couple of different angles from inside the WH. Nothing close to national security involved, of course.

But... At least five or six different anonymously sourced comments.

Well, I was, to be blunt, disgusted to some degree when I saw that, and I think a few other TPM regular readers were too. That said, neither the reporter nor Josh Marshall commented in response, said we’re sorry, etc.

I’ll venture a guess that as “new media” tries to get more and more into reporting, not just commentary, it will do more of the same selling itself out.

So, let’s not say this is just an MSM problem.