City paper gets snookered by Kuhl plant
The Rochester City paper is beloved by many progressives, but it appears its fact-checking standards are no better than those of the Gannett papers that plague this area. They’ve fallen for the same Kuhl letter-to-the-editor stunt about Beverly Massa’s accounting services that the Elmira Star-Gazette fell for:
According to their Federal Election Commission filings, the Massa campaign is paying Beverly Massa, Eric’s wife, about $65,000 to perform payroll and accounting services for the campaign. That’s right, $65,000!
In fact, the filing showed that Beverly Massa has been paid only nine thousand dollars. She’s been doing the books for the Massa campagin for close to four years. Up until now, she’s been doing it for free. The larger sum the the writer refers to represents what would be the back pay on the free years of work, were this ever to be paid (it shows up as campaign debt on this form and it’s not clear that it will ever be paid, since is has carried over from last cycle). It’s also worth noting that:
- 1. Massa has loaned the campaign 40K of his own money (see line 11D).
- 2. Kuhl’s son ran Kuhl’s campaign in 2006 and received about 41K from the campaign, including payments for months after the election (here; here).
I’m not criticizing #2, just making a point about people in glass houses.
One last point: the author of the article is a Republican member of the Richmond (Honeoye, NY) Town Board (as he describes it on his Linkedin page).
This brings us to the next question: why would the City paper run a letter like this?
- * They’re too lazy to fact-check letters, even when they make unsupported claims and come from obvious partisan operatives (which they could find out by googling).
- * The City mostly gets letters from liberals, since the bulk of the readership (I assume) is in the city of Rochester, so they like to let in conservative letters even when they’re factually challenged smear jobs, in order to maintain “balance”.
If you’d like to contact the City paper about this, you can do so at the address below:
themail@rochester-citynews.com.
Usually, papers say that LTEs don’t need to be fact-checked because they’re opinion. If you look at the current post on City’s site, they’ve added a little disclaimer with one of the facts that Exile mentions here.
So, they obviously think that fact-checking is important, but will only rouse themselves to do it if they are challenged to do so.
How hard would it be to fact check letters, though? They only publish three or four a week.
It wouldn’t be very hard. That’s why I think the newspapers who don’t fact-check are dropping the ball.