Last year, it was taxes ...

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No, No and No: Three Ways to Lose the Reader

The local color column this morning opens:

We have all heard, and maybe whistled, the tune, "shave and a haircut, two bits."

No, actually, we haven't. Despite, the ad salesman waxes on: It was a ditty made popular in 1939 and it's never lost its appeal.

It's a good thing this is an opinion column.

In driving around Englewood I could not help but notice all the barber shops this song is dedicated to.

No, actually, it isn't a song and it isn't dedicated to anyone or anything. It first appeared in 1899 at the end of "A Darktown Cakewalk," words by Charles Hale.

A quick skim through the Encyclopedia of Music finds the 1939 version is a 7-note coda, and the words were "shave and a hair cut -- shampoo." The 1939 version was "made popular" by Milton Berle, Lestor Lee, and Dan Shapiro.

But wait, there's more ways to go wrong in the absence of editors.

"Two bits," "five bob," and other expressions -- some not so nice -- are often used for the last two beats depending on the musician's context and intent. The distinctive beat (Latin clave) can be played effectively on car horns. Do this in Mexico, and the driver is tooting the very bad "chinga a tu madre, cabrón."

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Excited Crowds Greet Obama

Cutline1: Arcadians shout excitedly as president Barack Obama passes by in his motorcade Tuesday in DeSoto County, although he could not be seen from inside his limo.




Cutline 2: An excited crowed laughed, danced, waved their hands and supportive signs, took photos and chanted, "Obama! Obama! Obama!" as his presidential motorcade turned the corner where they gathered in Arcadia.

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"Losing the News" Local Chapter: Puppies and Pop Warner

The man who owns the biggest press and the most ink in these parts used his column Sunday to review Alex Jones’ Pulitzer Prize-winning book, “L0sing the News.” Derek Dunn-Rankin recapped Jones' 300-year history of the popular press and “its role in shaping the world’s longest running democracy.” Dunn-Rankin tells readers he learned from the book that the “iron core” of the newspaper’s job is not letters to the editor, sports or celebrity gossip: “ It is hard news that can only be generated by expensive reporting. It is news produced by time-consuming digging, fact gathering, and analysis. It is the news generated at the state legislature or the local sheriff’s department ...”

Old Word Wolf hopes Dunn-Rankin’s isn’t just arm-chair philosophizing but plans to use this new knowledge to set the tone for his own newspapers.

Long before Dunn-Rankin read Jones' book, the journalist's sense of purpose and ability to do that traditional job were long lost here in Arcadia and, apparently, in other Sun Coast Media zones, as well.

The day before the owner’s column ran, news editor Christy Arnold, lost it, big time. Her Saturday column became a self-defensive rant built on sarcasm and bad analogies before getting around to screaming at her readers. In five lines of capital letters (“GET A HOBBY. GET A DISTRACTION IN YOUR LIFE THAT MAKES YOU A LITTLE HAPPIER AND A LITTLE LESS NASTY TO OTHERS...”) she tells everyone to go away and stop bothering her about spelling errors, their personal opinion of the president, and the amount of a “bad news” they are forced to read.

Arnold’s reasoning is “we do the best we can.” Specific examples support her claim: “Want to announce your child’s 6th birthday? We’ll put it in the paper. ...Want to announce your wedding anniversary? We’ll let all your neighbors and loved ones know...” She goes on to list honor rolls, Pop Warner football, fundraisers and pet photos as exhibits D, E, F, and G in her we-do-it-all-for-you defense.

What she omits, however, is more interesting than either her display of bad temper or her feel-good examples. There’s no mention of covering city government, county commissioners, monitoring school district operations, keeping an eye on the public budgets – those little journalistic jobs that that help keep open government open. Old Word Wolf used to complain that biweekly school board news has been essentially rehashed agendas. As it turns out, those were the good old days. DeSoto readers don’t get even that anymore because a photo of pet goldfish (her example, not mine) is her priority. She’s doing the best she can.

Meanwhile, DeSoto readers are left in the dark about how “citizens’ boards” are chosen and when and where their meetings are held. How are background checks weighed when someone with a dubious life story is appointed by friends in high places to positions of power? How many husband-wife teams teach at the schools, staff government offices and make it difficult to impossible to take corrective steps when necessary? Where are the reports on all these “informal” meetings held at eateries and from pickup trucks, local commissioners leaning window-to-window ... to talk about what? Why does the school board vote unanimously, week in and week out with not one member initiating a public discussion about thousands of dollars of expenditures? Why do school board members say, at meetings, “we are not required to respond” when a man with a polite but potentially embarrassing question takes the podium? Christy Arnold's column tells readers that “doing the best we can” means “we’ve been intimidated by the powers that be so we're going to stick to Pop Warner and puppies.” We're doing the best that we can.

I hope Derek Dunn-Rankin plans to have a chat with Editor Arnold about what a newspaper’s job really is -- “Digging ... information .. that lets us better understand the world around us" is his choice quote. I hope he shares with her his vision about a paper that upholds traditional journalistic values: "accuracy, balance, holding government accountable and the separation of news and editorial viewpoint.”

And then I hope he has the same chat with Arcadia Editor Susan Hoffman.

And then I hope he will forgo his yacht-club membership for a year to put a real reporter – not a family friend or relative of the local hospital administrator – in charge of being democracy’s watchdog in our little town. We're doing the best we can -- but the "journalists" aren't helping much.

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Short-Change Complaints from One Gondolier Reader Increase

The headline: “Short-change complaints showing an increase.” The story doesn’t report this or anything remotely similar.

To say something is on the increase, real editors require (a) a report of how many events occurred last week, last month, last year – some base for comparison, and then (b) a report of how many events occurred this week, this month, this year.
“Crime Scene Columnist” Ken Kleinlein gives no such data. What he does offer, however, is a five-year-old urban legend as “news.”

Kleinlein claims “a potential victim from Texas, wrote” him (doesn’t say when). Now, Kleinlein is a retired cop in Sarasota. Unlike an actual journalist, Kleinlein doesn’t feel the need to name the “potential victim,” which might add some credibility to his story that Walmart customers are secretly charged for cash they didn’t ask for.

And a dash of credibility is sorely needed. The long letter Kleinlein puts inside quote marks is riddled with cop-speak: A supervisor “responded,” and “after the second transaction,” and “at this point,” just doesn’t sound like an irate “potential victim” describing his near-loss of $40 in a cash-back transaction at Houston Walmart.

The scam Kleinlein claims to be warning readers about is a five-year-old urban legend that has been pretty much debunked by the nice folks at Snopes, a Web site that looks into rumors and puts the results on the Internet for all to see – even Ken Kleinlein and Venice Gondolier editors. The urban legend claims Walmart employees secretly add “cash back” transactions when ringing up purchases. Snopes reports an early story circulated in November 2004, followed by a story from Milford, Del., and then a similar one from Houston, Texas – the city Kleinlein claims his correspondent contacted him from.

Kleinlein reports “Walmart Security is intensely investigating,” but he fails to tell who gave him this information or what intense involves.

Not to worry. Snopes investigated and found Walmart says clerks' registers are not equipped to add cash back transactions. Clerks cannot initiate cash-back requests. Only a customer can do this in a two-step process that includes pushing a “yes” button at the customer terminal and then selecting an amount. Furthermore, cash-back transactions are restricted to debit cards; the urban legend stories all involve credit card users.

Apparently the rumor is in revival. Just last month, a a real reporter in Traverse City, Mich., wrote on the same topic. The difference is, the Michigan reporter actually went to Walmarts, made phone calls, interviewed knowledgeable people, assembled facts, went to see with his own eyes how things work, and named and dated his work. The result: same as Snopes; the rumor is just there to scare you, folks.

How did this baseless rumor get started? Snopes says one reasonable inference is customers are “misplacing the blame for their own errors.”

As a juicy scare, the story gets legs every time a retired cop would rather sound knowledgeable than be knowledgeable. His ego error is compounded when the amateur writer’s editors don’t check their “columnist” against the basic standards of their profession. The only scam here stems from a newspaper that apparently doesn't see the need for accountability.

So, back to the headline. Is there an increase in “Short-change complaints?” Absolutely –- from Gondolier readers who crave genuine news instead of five-year-old fiction from five states away.

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Beware What You Wish For

The Sun-Herald’s DeSoto County subscribers are in for a treat, characterized as “icing on the cake,” says Joe Gallimore, the local newspaper office’s general manager. (He’s the guy with the office thermostat key who, on the side, promotes boxing matches featuring young boys.) Gallimore dedicates his Friday column to the news that cow country folks will be getting a weekly Arcadian. The GM punctuates an amazingly strange column with numerous assurances that extensive surveys, polls, and a vast number of sidewalk requests show him that readers want the old Arcadian back.

Well, apparently, they’re going to get it.

What Gallimore glosses over is that the paper's six-day-a-week local section disappears. Well, actually, he does say this, but in an oblique way that requires dedicated reading to figure out, as well as the stamina to wade through 30 inches of meandering hype that borders on the bizarre.

Here’s the brief tour:

Lede : (posed as a question): "How do you react to seeing your favorite baseball team in back in the bottom of the ninth ....?" That graf goes on for three long, clause-laden sentences directed at “you,” which in this case would be me, and frankly, Joe, I don’t give a damn.

Second graf: Readers learn that the above produces the “ultimate high.”

Third graf: GM Joe adopts the intimate, personal voice: “I want to inform you about a change ....” False alarm. Readers will not be informed, yet. First, they have to read that his fantastic bosses “are going to continue our commitment ... but this is only a start!”

Next graf: The nice newspaper folks plan to “communicate back to the reader with the ability of reaching more and providing more of what this community has said it wants.” Readers are probably willing to overlook the dubious grammar that fails to say what GM Joe thinks he’s saying because linguistically challenged in one’s native tongue has never been a bar to writing for Sun-Herald newspapers. That tradition continues unchanged.

Next graf: “Everyone knows how hard the economy has been ....” Right, Joe.
Next graf: OWW paraphrase: Opening and running a business is hard work. This is true, Joe.
Next graf: “The Sun Newspaper Group did just that 25 years ago....” Got it, Joe.
Next graf: “...this family owned, community oriented paper has lasted!” That’s Joe’s exclamation mark there.

Next graf: “...our company will indeed make seven-day-a-week delivery service happen ... we will introduce both a DAILY and a WEEKLY news product.” Love the caps and the “news product” thing.

Next graf: GM Joe promises a new news product to deliver “news of extreme importance (breaking news) pertaining to DeSoto including obituaries.” Readers can be forgiven for emitting a giggle at this point, so long as they don’t become distracted from the task of finding out exactly what the news might be.

At this point, 22 inches into the thing, GM Joe’s opus jumps to page 10: DeSoto subscribers will get the Charlotte Sun plopped into their driveways. On Thursdays, they’ll get that icing on the cake, a local insert. Not only is that the icing, it’s “the combined punch,” he writes.

GM Joe uses another 10 inches or so to praise bosses who are like family, expound on photos readers can look forward to (there is no staff photographer covering DeSoto), and to promise that the town will be blanketed with fliers heralding the Oct. 1 event.

Actually, the fliers are probably unnecessary. The column ran last Friday. On Saturday, editor Susan Hoffman made a similar, if more literate, announcement. And then on Sunday, she undertook a follow-up that took up nearly half of the front of the local news section.

When Monday and Tuesday rolled around with no further developments in the three-day story, Old Word Wolf knew “the ultimate high” was headed into a downer.

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Reilly: Quoting People He Didn't Interview

Steve Reilly’s report on a water-quality evaluation issued by a multi-state watchdog group ran today, Sept. 8. Without a time frame mentioned in the lede, however, the story startled 6 a.m.-readers awake when one of Reilly's sources says, “The report released today...”

Wow, that was fast! Well, maybe the water-quality report came out yesterday, and DeSoto readers don’t get news on Monday? Nope.

The story behind the day's big headline is that Reilly glossed over the little detail that Gulf Coast Restoration Network’s news hit the streets almost two weeks ago, on August 28.

Since then, Reilly has been busy interviewing sources, right? Well, not exactly.

The “today” reference comes from a state official who criticized the report in a prepared statement the day it was released -- "today" being August 28. Despite the reality that at least two other area newspapers and a radio station have already used the same quote, word for word, and acknowledged that the sources were quoted from prepared statements, Reilly chooses to quote the bureaucrat as if reporter and source had actually talked.

Reilly appears to do the same with at least two other people he quotes in the same story, representatives of state-wide and regional environmental groups: lots of words but no effort to tell readers that the "speakers" had issued prepared statements and weren't replying to Reilly's insightful questions.

This kind of reporting by omission does more for the writer’s ego than it does to help readers get a fair sense of what happened when and their ability to judge responses to the event. This writer deliberately creates the false impression that he made an effort to “dig,” as it used to be called. In fact, the writer took a week and a half to round up a lot of press releases that he stitched together in a way calculated to mislead.

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New Staff Writer Republishes His Old Stuff

Josh Salman, writing for the Times-Union back in January, led a story he wrote about solar power this way:

The Sunshine State is beginning to live up to its name, with an explosion of residents using solar-powered energy for both environmental and financial reasons.

Now a Charlotte Sun staff writer, Salman kicks off his Sunday story this morning on solar power the same way -- even recycling the "explosion of residents," despite having had nine months to reconsider:

The Sunshine State is beginning to live up to its name, with an explosion of residents using solar-powered energy for both environmental and financial reasons.

As a Times-Union reporter, Salman quoted a solar consulting firm:

... the new incentives are also expected to create an additional 22,000 solar-related jobs in Florida within 8 years, according to a study by Navigant Consulting Inc., a consulting firm specializing in the energy industry.

Charlotte Sun readers got essentially same data this morning, changing only a time frame that prompts the question of when, exactly, did this prediction take place.

State rebates and federal tax credits are expected to create more than 22,000 jobs in Florida within six years, according to Navigant Consulting, a firm specializing in the energy industry.

Salman’s newer solar energy story takes a breezy survey of officials, residents, and a saleswoman, culminating in these factoids:

The advantages of solar stretch beyond the wallet. Over its projected lifespan, a 5-kilowatt solar system will offset 298,106 pounds of carbon dioxide, 928 pounds of nitrogen oxide, 840 pounds of sulfur dioxide, and 57 pounds of particles that cause asthma. The savings are equivalent to taking one car off the road for 40 years, or planting nearly 3 acres of trees.

Readers, however, are left wondering: who said this? How was this equivalency calculated? These are extremely specific numbers. A fairly extensive Web search fails to locate a single one of them.

So: Welcome, Josh Salman. But stop recycling your old stuff. And start telling us where you get your data. If you are going to report something that’s not general knowledge, or numbers that require conversion, manipulation or interpretation, you are obligated to tell us who is giving you those numbers. It makes a difference if they come from a university laboratory or from a solar-panel salesman (or saleswoman). Just to show how obvious this problem is, the unsubstantiated/unattributed factoid that using a 5-kilowatt solar system over its lifetime is “equivalent of taking one car from the road for 40 years,” is meaningless unless we know whether the car is a 1969 Chevy Corvette or a 2009 Prius.

Actually, it's meaningless no matter what kind of car it is. All the more reason to know who is making this stuff up.

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Venice Gondolier Writer Rogovin Plagiarizes Tiny Yankee Newspaper

Gerald Rogovin, a Venice Gondolier “correspondent” who plagiarized a New York Times writer a while back, is at it again. In Wednesday’s issue (page 3A), Rogovin’s by line appears under the headline “Prolonged drought spurs anti-grass movement.”

This time, Rogovin didn’t dip into the Times; he hit up the minuscule Warwick, R.I., paper, where Joe Kernan published an article with the same theme back on May 14.

Rogovin’s article is weak from the start: he gives readers no news hook. The headline screams "prolonged drought," but not one word in the story mentions such a thing. OK, so “everybody knows" Florida faces an iffy water future, but still – this is a newspaper, guys. The rules are you have to tell readers who's talking drought this time. If you tell us that, we’ll overlook that we’re in the middle of Florida’s annual subtropical wet-season cycle, and there’s barely a place on this low-lying peninsula that doesn’t squish when you walk on it.

The second clue that Rogovin has transcended sloppy journalism and moved on to outright dishonesty is the sixth paragraph. He cites “water use consultant, Amy Vickers.” He doesn’t tell readers if she’s with a state, quasi-state, private, or public consulting agency. Despite the lack of a Florida reference for a Florida topic, she gets three paragraphs to advise us to use goats to "mow" our lawns. Now, Rogovin writes from Venice, where neighborhoods are generally subject to HOA's, city and county code enforcement, all with "no goats in the yard" types of rules.

The third clue that something major is amiss is when Rogovin writes that a famous landscape architect designed the lawn as we know it “a hundred years ago.” That would be 1909 or thereabouts, which would be real news: The man Rogovin thinks he’s citing died in 1852.

OWW’s regular readers know what’s coming next. Google had no trouble tracking the water expert, Amy Vickers, to the Warwick (R.I.) Beacon, where reporter Joe Kernan tells his readers that Vickers consults with the state of Massachusetts on water issues and made her remarks -- remarks that the Kernan quoted and Gerald Rogovin copied -- at an American Water Works Association’s conference.

Even so, Rogovin doesn’t copy accurately. He thinks it's ok to alter the speaker’s words that the original reporter placed inside quotes!

And by comparing the two stories – well, take a look for yourself:


Venice’s own Rogovin: A 25-by-40-foot patch of lawn requires 10,000 gallons of water to refresh in some parts of the country, even more in Florida, according to the National Gardening Association. Sixty percent of Florida’s water supply is used on lawns. The figure is higher in California. Last year, 26 million Americans spent $17 billion for professional landscaping on more than 25 million acres of lawn. That’s enough grass to cover the state of Virginia.
The Warwick Beacon: According to the National Gardening Association, 26 million people spend $17 billion on professional landscapers each year and there are more than 25 million acres of lawn spread across the country; enough grass to cover the state of Virginia. According to the American Water Works Association, a 25-foot by 40-foot patch of lawn requires 10,000 gallons of water each year. In certain sections of the country, even more water is used. In Florida, an average of 60 percent of its water supply is spent on lawns. In Southern California, 80 percent of their supply goes to lawns.
OWW: Rogovin reverses the order of the Yankee’s two statements; the flip-flop ends up mis-attributing one of them.

More Rogovin: One water use consultant, Amy Vickers, thinks that mowing and watering lawns has been overdone. “We could actually rent goats and other farm animals to ‘mow’ lawns,’ she suggested. “They could provide fertilization.” As for browning caused by unwatered lawns, she disagrees with those who suggest it is unattractive. "Browning is essential to healthy grass,” she said.
The Warwick Beacon: Vickers [earlier properly identified as a consultant to the state of Massachusetts] said that the browning you see on un-watered lawns may be unpleasant for you but it is essential for the grass. “As for mowing your lawn, that has been overdone as well,” she said. “Native grasses were always naturally trimmed by grazing animals and you can actually rent goats and other farm animals to ‘mow’ your lawn. They also provide fertilizer as well.”

OWW: Rogovin, again, flips the sentence order, but retains the essence of the ideas. To make Vickers seem “local,” he avoids mentioning her affiliation or the context of her remarks. He also alters her quote from the original writer's report.

Rogovin's local copy at this point leaves the water consultant and moves back in time: "One hundred years ago, Andrew Jackson Downing, considered the dean of landscape gardening, pushed Americans to mow and water their lawns." Rogovin continues with a quote from the dean:

“Producing a well-kept lawn is worth whatever it costs,” he wrote. The "he wrote" attribution is supposed to be Downing from his book about landscaping. It ain't so.

But Rogovin pushes on, writing "What he didn’t tell his readers was that the estate on which he developed his theory required a full-time staff of 10 gardeners, unlimited water and chemicals."

The Warwick writer wrote it this way: The next time you see one of those cute Victorian cottages with all the filigree scroll work trim, you can thank the man who brought you that endurable style architecture. You can also thank him for the inescapable presence of the American lawn.

Essential to any beautiful garden, according to Andrew Jackson Downing over 150 years ago, was “grass mown into a softness like velvet.” In his Treatise on the Theory and Practice of Landscape Gardening in 1859 he said, “No expenditure in ornamental gardening is, to our mind, productive of so much beauty as that incurred in producing a well kept lawn.”

What wasn’t in Downing’s treatise was the time and expense of 10 workers to maintain “so much beauty.” Privately, he told a friend the estate he used as an example required 10 full-time workers to maintain. His book also never considered the amount of water or envisioned the number of chemicals that maintaining the suburban lawn would entail. Nevertheless, the Downing-inspired lawn movement spread and has continued almost unabated into this century.

OWW: Rogovin pilfers the original writer’s feature lede. To make it his own, Rogovin inserts several errors. Rogovin incorrectly paraphrases a passage from a book he doesn’t name, and then has the audacity to put the paraphrase in quotation marks. He willfully rewrites history; he fails to check the source (Andrew Jackson Downing’s posthumously republished Treatise is online at Archives dot org, and the words the Warwick writer cites are searchable and verifiable.) Rogovin didn’t do this. He ends up saying a mid-19th century landscaper was concerned about the use of chemicals. I checked; Downing doesn't mention using chemicals on his lawns or landscapes in this context.

Rogovin, a "correspondent," probably needed the cash and duped his editors into believing he was sending over a great story that included an expert on lawns, interesting historical references, and a screamer about an anti-lawn movement. The guy got fifty bucks or so, the editor got plagiarism, and readers got nothing.

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Lake Placid, like Diogenes, Searches for One Honest Editor

Last week, it was three paragraphs.* Today, it begins with one sentence. And like a stray thread on a cheap sweater, Old Word Wolf pulled -- and the whole thing unraveled. The cheap sweater is George Duncan's column, Random Thoughts, bottom of page 7 of The Journal, which hit the streets and newsboxes in Lake Placid this morning.

From a blogger comes this account of a ruling by Judge Janice Rogers Brown of the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. Judge Brown does what millions of taxpayers have always wanted to do - she zapped the IRS. She vividly starts the majority opinion in Cohen v. United States this way: “Comic-strip writer Bob Thaves famously quipped, ‘A fool and his money are soon parted. It takes creative tax laws for the rest.’ States Rogers: “In sum, the IRS unlawfully expropriated billions of dollars from taxpayers, conceded the illegitimacy of its actions, and developed a mandatory process as the sole avenue by which the agency would consider refunding its ill-gotten gains. (The Journal, Aug. 12, underlining in mine)

Since Duncan doesn’t name the blogger, OWW did a word search. The phrase “She vividly starts with the majority opinion in Cohen v. United States this way” ran in an Aug. 7 blog staffed by McClatchy News, Miami Herald owners. Duncan used the line, word for word, and then he used the blogger's quotes of the original document (I'm betting, but I can't really be sure. Maybe Duncan did go to the court decision -- it's on the Web -- and extracted exactly that quote. Somehow, though, I doubt it.)

"She vividly..." etc., is a one-liner, but it’s someone else’s one-liner. Duncan did manage to choke out “a blogger,” so he earns partial credit. But the newspaper editor hasn’t mastered using quotation marks around words he didn’t write, and he seems to have forgotten whatever he knew about using phrases like “said Michael Doyle, a reporter for McClatchy News Service’s Washington Bureau.”

The unraveling begins. The editor’s one-line transgression prompted OWW to take a closer look at the rest of his column. In his column's second Random Thought, Duncan reports remarks made by a congressman who opposes the national healthcare bill. Duncan offers a blanket attribution at the outset: “National Review online details this story about Rep. Anh “Joseph” Cao, R-New Orleans, who studied to be a Jesuit priest ...”

Google returns 456 places that used Cao's “I know that voting against the health care bill will probably be the death of my political career,” starting with The Examiner, wandering over to Politico, the Daily Mail, Catholic News Agency and a bunch of religious, right-to-life and right-wing nut sites. Not one hit is returned for National Review Online.

However, nearly every site that uses the congressman’s remarks tips a hat to the original source, the August 1 edition of The Times Picayune. A few sites even go so far as to name the hardworking reporter who cornered the hometown congressman and took the trouble to write down his words: Times Picayune Washington Bureau writer Jonathon Tilove.

Duncan wasn’t one of the hat tippers. Duncan appears to make no use of the miracle of the World Wide Web and his desktop browser to even try to credit the primary source. He apparently has relied on a report of a report – a source that he can’t remember and blithely tosses off to the NRO.

In fairness, perhaps National Review Online does carry word of the congressman's stand buried so deep that Google can't find it, so Old Word Wolf used NRO’s own search engine repeatedly, trying with the terms “Cao,” “being a Jesuit,” and “death of my political career.” Nothing found by NRO searching its own archive search feature.

OK, so Duncan didn’t source an interview that he didn’t conduct, and he didn’t accurately remember where he got the iinformation from. Could it get any worse? That’s a rhetorical question and the answer is yes.

Duncan’s an editor and he’s allowed to editorialize. He can make relevant (or even irrelevant) observations about the news that reflects his opinion. Here’s his opinionizing about congressman Cao’s willingness to commit political suicide:

Cao’s remarks call to mind the famous scene in A Man for All Seasons where Thomas More confronts his betrayer Richard Rich, who was made Attorney General for Wales for falsely testifying against him: “Why Richard, it profits a man nothing to give his soul for the whole world... but for Wales?”

This fine bit of editorializing ran word for word in a blog posted last week in The Weekly Standard. The association between the famous play and current event came to the mind of columnist John McCormack in his blog post titled "But for Wales."

The fruits of McCormack’s thoughts were harvested by George Duncan and secretly grafted onto Lake Placid’s cheerful little journal -- presumeably for personal aggradizement and ego gratification rather than a journalist's motivations to uncover the truth or inform readers.

George Duncan closes his paragraphs on Congressman Cao by noting that Cao is a man of morals and integrity. Duncan wraps up the whole column by remarking that Diogenes searched for one honest man.

Lake Placid readers are still searching for one honest editor.

* of plagiarism, that is.

And there's more unraveling below the fold:

OWW hadn't looked into The Journal's news editor when he was hired last year. If she had, she would have found out that the man who calls himself a writer and journalist, runs a personal blog that features "Science Fiction, Faith, and Golf." The logo's centerpiece is The Good Book.

Duncan's works of fiction -- and we're not refering here to his newspaper editorials -- are prominent stock among several Christian book clubs. And, like so many hypocrites before him, Duncan promotes himself as holier-than-the-liberals and a family-values kind of moralist.

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