Lynda Clancy shows 'em how to write.

I really liked Lynda's Herald Gazette article "Warren blasts CRC health, methadone culture" 

Unlike some reportage  from that occasionally fine newspaper, here Clancy effortlessly draws together milieu, storyline, meeting participants, backstory, the conflicting sociologies and economics of this event, in which a California based company held a public meeting on its proposal to place a methadone clinic in the tiny Midcoast Maine town of Warren

The simple lines that won my heart was when she wrote:  Still another person shouted, "Let him talk! Let the man finish." 

Documenting that tempering voice in the midst of jeers and uproar revealed to readers the essential civic decency of the wrathful  townfolk, even in the midst of this highly charged event, where angry town residents in the packed gymnasium are not only rejecting the proposal, but also signing petitions calling for the ouster of town manager and code officer. 

It was like a written version of  Norman Rockwell's "Freedom of Speech" painting, something I recently had the pleasure of lingering over in its original form. 


Great work, Lynda. Something that the town ought to keep in its archive. 

(But then I'm an amateur historian, and loathe the general run of  low-information and frequently critically deficient coverage of locally important events that all too many other journalists are, alas, prone to produce.)

Village Shlep: why won't Herald Gazette reporter Auciello cover both sides of the local windpower stories?

Sometimes you just have to gnash your teeth over the  determination of local commercial media workers to avoid rocking the boat of Commerce.  Take Village Soup's Herald Gazette reporter Shlomit Auciello.

Please.  

Joking aside, Auciellot reports on windmill stories for the Herald Gazette, which covers Knox County, Maine, from coastal  Camden to Port Clyde on Penobscot Bay's shores, and inland to the town of Washington and the upper Saint George River Valley.
     
Unfortunately, as her stories reveal, she is demonstrably content to be stenographer to industry, uncritically reprinting every oneliner the industry can feed her, while brazenly editing out dissenting opinions and inconvenient truths from her windpower stories. 
     
Consider her latest story on the topic Camden Select Board reviews wind proposals... -a story which doesn't even mention the word " windmill", and scrubbed  out the fact that windfarm promoter George Baker's claim, of having already met with "a bunch of regulators" about his plans for Ragged Mountain, turns out, on questioning, to have been an informal meeting with a single former member of the Maine Public Utility Commission.    It was not newsworthy to her  that Baker had boldly knowingly lied to the people of Camden and their duly elected representatives at the meeting, which aired on community cable too. Nor of course, were the convolutions Baker went through to avoid answering the Big Question. 


All Camdenites were no doubt eager to learn how many windmills  the Island Institute and the investors squatting behind them have in mind.  But neither such fundamental information, nor even coverage of George Baker's see-no-evil antics in keeping this vague was to be found in her reportage. 
     
Or Shlomit Auciello's immortal May 12, 2010 piece: Camden Hills windplanners gain approval for on-campus turbine which can be summarized again as uncritical stenography of what one source calls  "a carpetbagging Massachusetts firm" using public relations spin on credulous journalists, to gets high school students to squeeze their parents for $500,000 dollars to buy and operate a wind turbine. Where? In the midst of a owl- and other bird-rich coastal forest area. A windmill that, both the manufacturer and  the University of Massachusetts professorial windpower shill George Baker admit, probably won't perform worth a hoot.  But for Aucello, evidently, that nature stuff,  and the admitted uselessness of the community's investment, is not news worth informing her readers of.


Those two tales follow the same wind industry uber alles line as Auciello's two windpower-related stories from  earlier this year:


March 10, 2010  Sharing the bottom: Maine Fishermen's Forum looks at wind energy
Again Shlomit  Auciello excises her Krhuschev-like magic eraser to blot out  the chief participants in this story of a presentation at this annual gathering of lobstermen, groundfishers and other commercial fishermen  of a state plan to begin leasing state waters to the wind industry.  Despite there being a furious roomful of fishfolk disputing this pronouncement, Auciello quotes only from the wind industry and its governmental supporters. 


"Prepare to share" Maine  marine resources Comissioner George Lapointe told the assembled.  But true to form, Herald Gazette reporter Shlomit Auciello was prepared to share only industry and government's point of view with her listeners, not that of the fishermen - whose Forum this gathering was, after all!

February 18, 2010 Monhegan islanders hear more about wind study plans

  "Approximately 25 people attended a meeting on Monhegan Island Feb. 16 to learn more about plans for a deepwater wind energy testing site to be located about 2.5 miles off the island's shore."  Were there dissenters at the meeting?  Yes. Did she cover that fact? No!  Is there a lawsuit in Maine Superior Court about the very recently approved plan being touted at the meeting? Yes!  Did Auciello know? Yes. Does she mention it in her coverage? No!  

What is one to do in the face of this sort of censorship?  Thanks to all the social media, from blogs to twitter and everything in between, one can get information directly to persons or demographics of interest.   

    

But the proud imprimatur of unbiased  professional journalism, that  has long been stamped on Maine's print media, is vanishing as Auciello and others like her reflexively use the delete button on dissenting points of view in their copy.

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.

Maine Media Watch's Worst Headline of the Month winners.

While there are failures of modern journalism everywhere, every month a few practitioners of the craft in Maine reach new lows in headline writing, reportage, editorializing, and other duties of the 4th Estate. Let's examine two of these anti-paragons, in hopes that a little sunshine will help clear the miasma from certain brains.....

Worst Headline of the Month: the headline writer at the Belfast Republican Journal.

"Sears Island one of seven choices for wildlife refuge" the headline on an article by Tanya Mitchell asserts.
Ah but it just ain't so. The National Wildlife Refuge manager in Maine is seeking new headquarters for the Maine Coastal Islands NWR. If Sears Island were selected, the Refuge would bulldoze, blast and pave part of the island for its office and parking lot. But it would not designate a single square inch as a protected refuge. The story's writer got it right, although she did commit the reporterial sin of announcing an important public meeting but then leaving out the location. ("in Searsport") Um..... where in Searsport? Sears Island meetings have been held in at least three different locations in that town.

Worst of the Month Runner up. Headline writer for the BDN

Michaud: No health care forum

Aug 19, 2009 09:48 pm | By Kevin Miller BDN Staff

What!? Representative Michaud is not going to hold a forum on the reorganizing of American healthcare? Of course he is. What the headline writer left out was that the representative declined to hold a "joint" health care forum that would have been co-led by an unannounced candidate for the opposing political party.

Well, duh...What authority does the bloke have for being entitled to co-chair? Maybe he should actually declare for the position and go through the official paperwork before tainting our noosphere with his ambitions

MPBN, Village Soup, other Maine media shrug and turn aside as Baldacci affirms his pro-torture position re Mainer inmates

It is a terrible dare, to stand up against the System when in Maine state prison. Unlike other states in New england and Elsewhere, Maine prison officials cling to an archaic labyrinthine hodgepodge of human rights-violating prison punishment practices and policies. Taking issue with inhumane conditions or treatment opens inmates to sure retribution, exacted in excruciating detail But for MPBN and other media. that's not a story

Already, with the hunger strike of a collective group of inmates being held in sensory deprivation cells of officially ended, Deputy Corrections Commissioner Denise Lord gloats that 'no changes will be made' in our state's sick policy of putting inmates into punishment cells for months of prolonged sensory deprivation. Inmates at Maine state prison carried out a similar hunger strike in 2006

So does Maine media look into why these eight Mainers dared to put their necks on the line?

Of course not! (with a few tiny exceptions). Take Herald Gazette/Village Soup reporter Shlomit Auciello. Please!
Primed to the gills with info about the raisons d'etre for the Maine state prison's present and past hunger strikes, about Maine's history of retribution against those inmates daring to lawfully rock the boat about the devastating effect that prolonged sensory deprivation has on the minds and hearts of those being held in such circumstances, primed with all this info what does Shlomit Auciello do?

Why, she builds her story around the exhalations of the Great Bloviator: Associate Corrections Commissioner for Public Relations Denise Lord. Right from the start:

"According to DOC Associate Commissioner Denise Lord...."

Lord is good at her job. Like one of Saddam's officials, or a guantanamo public affairs officer he can extoll the positive side of torture: it is "an incentive to inmates " Auciello dutifully reports this party line.

"They have access to reading materials and magazines," Lord observed, leaving out the well known observation that anyone held in sensory deprivation units quickly becomes disoriented and unable to read as the days and weeks pass.

Most disgraceful perhaps. Auciello tries to sugarcoat the disgusting fact that at any given moment, the state of Maine continually puts men and women in and out of sensory deprivation tanks for widely varying lengths of time. Letting Lord get away with spinning it polyannaishly as "fewer than 2.5 percent of the prison's 2,200 inmates!" as though sensory deprivation was not a practice that can only be described as intentional infliction of torture, carried out in the name of the People of Maine.

But that wasnt the story Lord wanted, and Auciello like the rest of the callow media went right along with the associate commish.

So, policies that so conflict with international human rights treaties that global sanctions against te Baldacci Administration ought to be imposed? Not an issue.

Inmate-rights organizations are pumping up the volume, taking Baldacci to task
beyond the beachhead that the hunger strikers have established in their brief campaign. They are doubtless learning the punitive consequences of their courage, which we should not allow to have happened in vain.

Let's convince the Governor that Maine needs to join other New England states (and the rest of the civilized world) and remove the stain to our honor of our adhering to an archaic labyrinth of human rights-violating prison punishment practices and policies.

From sensory deprivation in long term punishment isolation cells, to forced exile to distant states, deputy commissioners and wardens pick and choose from a palette of cruelty to suit their moods.

Let's put an end to this

Soup spills into fish documentary

Ah, Souperwoman. How DO you do it? The videographer arrives from Frisco, the producer from Portsmouth, and the local guy connecting them with Knox County fishermen squires them to Lobsterman Art Johnson for a satisfying go-round in his backyeard amid his still-homeported trap gear. Then to the fish pier, where connector-man checks in with the Western Sea, Plan B, Double Eagle and other boats, all alive with spring-cleaning. He motions them on down to the end: Captain Fill of the ' Sea is willing to talk. They amble down, quick words along the way with the Live Lobster folk and the bait people.

We are all there at end of the fishpier, finally and the good Captain has allotted some time from his busy schedule, sitting relaxed on dock, while his crew works around him, grinning in anticipation of being video'd for national news distribution. The producer begins her low key language dance, working out the psycholinguistics for a good interview.

WHEN IN POPS A VILLAGE SOUP REPORTER

...stepping into the documentary space between the interviewer and her camera shooter, and Capt Fill. "Wait!" she announces, and the camera lowers, pulls back "Me first."

Danny Fill raises an eyebrow at the producer. She shrugs. The reporter demands the Captain's name, inquires as to his business (he tips his head toward the Western Sea, the steel herring seiner rising and falling in the Gulf of Maine swell behind him.) Meanwhile the interviewer, videographer trade glances with the local producer. He clears his throat. The Soupie stops (she is snapping photos of Capt Fill now) and then, recollecting that there ARE other people here, steps back, and Meg the producer restarts to her colloquoy with Danny Fill.
tend to modify the observed, a privilege that is reserved to the documentarians and their subject.

Or should be. Souperwoman stays inside the frame, for all the world as if this were a press conference.

Eventually the interview is over, and as the captain returns to working on his boat, we shift to a lobster smacker, back from transporting lobsters from island fishermen to the mainland. He is interested but declines, politely but firmly, to be interviewed. He does agree to talk off camera and Meg quizzes him about healthcare. The Village Soup reporter again inserts herself into the frame with her own questions and photography. The local producer moves up the pier, considering the next interviewees. They head to the North End Shipyard, where the wooden masts of half a dozen windjammers rake the sky.

Captain Brenda Thomas of the schooner Isaac Evans is nowhere to be found, but the Souper proves useful and finds him the boat's phone #. He calls and reaches her husband, who listens to the proposition of being interviewed. Shortly he walks up through the shipyard. An interview with he, (much Soup insertion, of course). Finally Captain Walker shows, agrees to be interviewed, too, and take camera crew aboard her schooner, clambering across another to reach the Isaac Evans. Only a bit of Soup this time, as the quarters aboard are rather tight for captain and documentary crew AND soup reporter.

Things come to an end. The footage is shot, the words are all in the can. A quick stop to get a release signature from Lobsterman Artie Johnson Local Producer, the the documentary crew a share a round at the Black Bull, and all go their seperate ways. Meg got what she came for. Consumers Union will have its health care story. Village Soup will have its story "the making of a documentary".

And when it duly is published, the local producer reads it and sighs. He's not in the "making of" story at all. A casual reader would think the Souper Reporter had done it all on her ownsome.
He jots her a quick email subject lined with a "Thanks for the coverage of the health care video crew" to fan her ego, but with this message in the body: "...And a hearty middle finger for leaving me entirely out of it."

Childish, but one must observe the proprieties.

Village Soup - thin broth on railroad fumes

The Village Soup/Knox County Times editorial against regulating Maine Eastern Railroad's diesel fumes is a remarkable exercise in transforming a column of smoke into a tower of humbug. It being unsigned, let us give VS's anonymous editorial writer(s) the politically correct moniker Souperhuman

The basic premises of Souperhuman's opposition to regulating the MER's aged diesel engines are that, (1) trains being generally interstate commerce, regulation of their pollution discharges is the province of the federal government; (2) railroad interests would sue the city of Rockland; and (3) Can't prove its the train's pollution making the air in a Rockland neighborhood noxious.

Interstate Commerce. While this may be true in limited cases for interstate trains involved in interstate commerce, Maine Eastern's reoute begins in Rockland and peters out in Brunswick Maine, about 70 miles from the Maine border. Not crossing state lines, it does not fit into the category of interstate commerce. The feds have shrugged off enforcement of air pollution to the states; these have in large measure, fobbed off what they could to municipalities. Especially revealing was the admission at a recent city council meeting that MER's half century old diesels would not be allowed to operate in New York state because of their pollution discharges. Helloooo? Souperhuman?

SLAPPing Rockland. Railroad interests have threatened the city of Rockland with a SLAPP suit. Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation work by threatening opponents of a polluter with costly lawsuits, that, regardless of outcome, will require expenditure on legal fees, filing costs and the other minutiae of litigation. But litigation is how we Americans defend and improve our republic. Without lawsuits,

As to the relative toxicity of the train's fumes, Souperman quotes a letter to the its editor from a local oil burner mechanic, who raises the 'diesel-engines-are-omnipresent-so-how-can-you- prove-it's-the-train-stinking-out-your-home?' argument. This claim, beloved of polluters everywhere, from cigarette makers to paper mills to construction debris incinerators, attempts a smokescreenian blurring of responsibility. If everyone's guilty, nobody's guilty!

But Maine's most important environmental law, the site location of development act, gives Maine regulators the authority to examine just that-- the cumulative impact of new additions to an area's air pollution load. No business may "adversely affect existing uses, scenic character, air quality, water quality..." in Maine. Even international shipping can have to meet local air pollution requirements while running their diesels while docked. This rather obvious applies to a diesel train running its engines while stationary at a terminal as well.

Stir the pot, Souperhuman! A bit of you-know-what has risen to your editorial surface.