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.