Lazy Reporters
I'm getting really sick and tired of sloppy, lazy political reporting.
The DDN did it the other day, writing about a "citizen" who was persuaded by Blackwell, who in fact turned out to be a Republican campaign manager.
Bush did it the other day with an ex-Republican candidate for office fron New Orleans, and now the PeeDee gets punked.
After the 40-minute rally, Estruth said he was not ready to vote Democratic. He was put off, he said, by their harsh rhetoric."I wanted to see if he was an executive with clear plans for fixing the state," he said about Strickland. "What I got was partisan talk. He confirmed my worst fears."
Turns out Mr Estruth has given thousands of dollars to Ken Blackwell and Republicans according to SoS campaign finanace filings.
Can the press please do some rudimentary checks before quoting these plants ?
Thanks to reader RL for the tip.
You should update that story
Although he has not given to Mr. Blackwell this year, he's only donated to Mr. Blackwell while he has been running for Governor and he and his wife gave almost the maximum amount to Blackwell during the primaries.
Yep, that's a real fence sitter there.
I'm confused
Blackwell and Strickland both were running late last year
Well, it's been a year since he donated, so he could argue that he's changed his mind and that's why he stopped donating.
Blackwell and Strickland created and started fundraising for the primaries last year.  So he donated to Blackwell's gubernatorial campaign for the May primaries, but all of his donations were on last year's campaign finance reports.
And no, it doesn't matter.  The guy clearly was a strong, early support for Blackwell during the primaries which makes his sudden claim that he was a fence sitter until last week seem very dubious.  Like I said, I think the case is stronger than Russell made it sound that this guy is a Blackwell toadie.  After all he was one of the first to sign up and contribute as much as he could.
That's what i was thinking
This is an awesome post...
...and why open-source reporting is so important.
Great job Russell!





What galls me
Sorry, I'm just on a rampage about the media this week. the way they framed the judge in that wiretapping decision infuriates me. I now expect that every pro-corporate Supreme Court decision will be introduced by pointing out that it was a weakly reasoned decision by a rightwing Republican appointee with corporate tie. No? Yeah, I didn't think so.
And they wonder why we get our news on the internet. Sheesh.