How to Knock the Mayoral Fiasco, and Bill Johnson's Announcement, Off the Front Page

The Democrat and Chronicle's Paint-By-the-Numbers Deception.

Suppose you were a corrupt newspaper editor.   Just suppose.

You're up to your eyeballs in a seedy effort to, essentially, install a Mayor without an election.   It's blown up in your face, through comic ineptitude of your political partners.   Now, worst of all, the one man who can beat your boy, even in an election already rigged, has announced his candidacy.

Must distract the rubes with a diversion.

Here's how it's done, kids:

1.   Sieze advantage of the context.   Misdeeds by a former airport director recently lent an unsavory connotation, in the public mind, to credit cards used by the Airport authority:

Airport credit cards   =   misuse, cigars and strippers

2.   Kill two birds with one stone.   You desperately want to unseat the incumbent County Executive.   Voila!   Front page news about the County Executive's Airport Authority credit card.   Because Airport authority credit card   =   bad. Stow that mortal threat to your mayoral candidate's campaign on the local page.

3.   Nuance is everything.   Don't report that out of all instances of use of the Exec's Airport Authority credit card, $1,300 was for County business more properly charged to a different County department.   Instead say the $1,300 was "unrelated to airport business."   Thus recalling to the reader all the horrors of cigars and strippers!

The D&C, self-appointed "watchdog," needs a watchdog itself.

The corruption of its editors is past the point where satire, or analytical exposition of their deceptions, is enough.

Who are these people.   The people, not "the newspaper."   The people who make the decisions that produce the newspaper.  Who watches over them?   When they afflict the innocent and reward the guilty, who oversees that?   Who watches over these malefactors of influence who propagandize a community in the interest of whichever political faction they're backing at the moment?

Who are they?   What are their associations and interests.   What's in their expense accounts.   What are they doing behind closed doors?

We here are willing to make a start.   What do any of you know about them?   Tell us.   Tell us about Karen Magnuson, Michael Kane, James Lawrence.   The public they abuse and deceive has a right to know.

To paraphrase the headline of this morning's editorial, the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle needs an independent investigative team.