The best part of this job is hearing from readers. Here’s a few items from my mailbag.
“Hi Greg. I know the Press Herald belongs to the ‘Chicken Little’ school of journalism, but consider this as a potential Christmas present headline for your readers: 98.5 percent of Mainers haven’t contracted COVID. The survival rate statewide is 99 percent. Those numbers are true and would certainly cast Gov. Janet Mills’ and Maine CDC Director Shah’s absurdities in a different light – one people need to be aware of – Be a good journalist for a change. Merry Christmas.”
Wow, when you look at it that way, that really is good news!
That must be why they celebrate 9/11 in New York City – only 3,000 people died out of 6 million New Yorkers! 99.5 percent were fine. Why wasn’t that the headline, I wonder?
And the Great Depression must have been no big deal. Only 25 percent of the country was out of work, so for 75 percent it was business as usual.
Fewer than 10 percent of smokers die of lung cancer. I guess pointing out that smoking is the No. 1 preventable cause of death in the country must be a lot of media hype, too.
Maybe we should write only about the majority of planes that don’t crash, or the drunken drivers who make it home safely, or the banks that don’t get robbed. Why so much attention to these rare exceptions?
And Happy Holidays to you.
Or this one, from a reader in Kennebunk:
“This paper is nuts. You won’t even report the truth about the Georgia election when it can be seen on camera. You are really are in the tank for the left wing of the Democrat Party. As I have said this election was a total fraud in the swing states. Voting rules were changed to enable fraud in Pennsylvania, Georgia, Michigan, Wisconsin and Arizona in violation of the U.S. Constitution.
“If we don’t correct this now, our elections will lose all credibility and we will become a banana republic. Are there any journalists out there that will report the truth? Are we entitled to both sides of an issue any more?”
Mr. Kennebunk, not every issue has two sides. Like, I could say there is an eighth day of the week that Big Calendar has been hiding from us all these years. It falls between Sunday and Monday, and I should have been getting it off as part of my weekend. The paper owes me 130 months pay for working all of those Slursdays!
But the seven-day-week forces don’t need to worry yet. Because I would have to come up with some proof.
So far, the Trump campaign has been laughed out of court in all the states you mention. No judge has yet agreed that the Constitution prevents states from changing voting rules in an emergency. It was one of the most democratic elections in history, with a huge turnout for both parties. I think the republic is safe for now, although I do like bananas. And nuts.
“I picked up my copy of the Sunday Telegram this morning and at the top of the front page were the words in bold print: ‘Every day, we deliver journalism you can trust.’ Nothing could be farther from the truth. The paper follows the leads of other newspapers like The Boston Globe, The New York Times and The Washington Post and most of the liberal left media. One might ask, why continue purchasing the newspaper. My answer is twofold. First, the paper is 95 percent accurate in the Obituary Section and at my age, I like to keep up on friends or acquaintances that have passed on. Secondly, paper costs around 13 bucks a week. An eight-pound bag of kitty litter is around the same price and both the paper and the kitty litter serve the same purpose. A Conservative Democrat in Scarborough.”
Dear Conservative Democrat, we have something in common – I like to read the obituaries, too – it’s a history of the state told one story at a time. They should be accurate since they are written by the family of the deceased. To my knowledge, we haven’t once had the subject of an obit call into say that they were not, in fact, dead, but over the years there have been one or two issues with photos.
Glad your cat appreciates us. As for the “liberal media” conspiracy, one possibility to consider is that when all the best newspapers in the country say the same thing, there’s a chance that they could be right.
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