Too FEW cooks spoil the broth, too

Imagine you are a reporter for a weekly midcoast Maine newspaper, and you are tipped to a secret mission of wind industry R&D representatives heading to Monhegan to do a dog and pony show to the winter natives of the island. You learn that an opponent of that very wind R&D project is going there too, and  has bones to pick with the R&D-ers.

Imagine that the opponent records the presentation and the question and answer period following and lets the reporter hear the discontent of the Monhegan Islanders over the vagueness of the would be wind R&Ders promises to "monitor". Let's the reporter hear the wind reps promise to withdraw if there are serious repercussions to birds, or to the view or to the quality of life of Monheganers.  Let her hear proof there is a bill sneaking about the back halls of the Maine legislature to open up all of Maine's coastal waters to wind farming.

Let the reporter know that the opponent - shooting photographs for the reporter - got caught in encroaching darkness and sleet and snow on  a slick cliff trail at a remote corner of the island, and sought and received a helping guide back to his lodging (joining the "100,000 club" of people who've gotten turned around in the island's eastern wildlands and brought back to civilization by patient  islanders.)  Give the reporter some of those those hard-attained photos, and of the meeting of Monhegan's citizenry with the wind industry R&Ds.

Imagine the story that could come out from this concatenation of  engineers, fishermen, hoteliers, plantation, officials, fishermen, a litigator. that could come from the plain-as-can-be  skepticism  evinced by  the islanders challenging smooth talking wind industry reps.

The story you can imagine is not the story that appeared in the  Herald Gazette newspaper, that has shown up in news aggregators  picking up the story.

No. Reporter Auciello threw all that out the window and did what any reporter who chooses not to shake the tree that  pays the newspaper's bills would do:  Cover the story exclusively from the point of view of the industry and  scissor out anything that conflicts with the industry spin.

A quick phone call to one of the engineers, and reporter Auciello had her story:  Everything's wonderful,  the wise industrial plan is underway, there is nothing hampering, nothing challenging the smooth flow of industrial control over  that bit of the Gulf of Maine.

Auciello's story faithfully reports as fact each slick one liner the wind industry's public relations people have dangleed before her. Her job is safe. For now.  What about the point of view of the Monhegan islanders?  Auciello does not quote a single one of them. What about the opponents of the wind farm plan?  That too is not newsworthy. Only the March of Industry, laid out in purple prose that must've have made the energy industry's own PR flacks .

Another writer in the same stable as Auciello is Steve Betts, once editor of the Courier Gazette but now downsized  to reporterdom.  A crucial difference between the two is that veteran scribbler Betts  may bend facts to suit his editorial fancies, but at least he presents the facts to the public, distorted though they may be.

Auciello, alas, belongs to the newer school of journalism, those who sense a $word of Damocles hanging overhead, ever ready to part them from their jobs should they rattle  the bill-paying powers that be.