Fucking With the Newspaper.

I decided to write a letter to the editor of my crappy redneck newspaper today.

Here is the letter:

I have come to expect shoddy and biased reporting from the Kerrville Daily Times, but the cowardice and propagandizing displayed by the paper this last week have shocked even me. Over the last week, Gary Trudeau’s Doonesbury strip has published a series of cartoons critical of the recent Texas law requiring women seeking an abortion to undergo a ‘transvaginal ultrasound’. This is an unpleasant, degrading, and medically unnecessary procedure forced on Texas women for purely religious reasons. In his controversial strips, Trudeau rightly calls this unconstitutional action for what it is, the rape of women by the state of Texas.

Naturally, the Daily Times did not have the courage to run these strips. Nor did the paper even inform its audience that it was censoring Doonesbury. Instead, the Daily Times re-ran older strips without any indication the content they were censoring, nor the editorial staff’s reasons for doing so. Meanwhile, in Friday’s paper, the Daily Times ran a short article celebrating the 25^th anniversary of the Pregnancy Resource Center.

Let me be blunt. The staff of the Pregnancy Resource Center, and the staffs of similar institution across the country, are lying, misogynist parasites. In the name of protecting ‘life’, these people ruin lives, squander potential and destroy hope. I wonder how many of the reports of domestic violence, child abuse or neglect filed with Kerrville police department are from the homes of women convinced by the PRC to continue a pregnancy that was not in their best interests. By censoring pro-choice voices and giving free publicity to anti-choice fanatics, the Kerrville Daily Times has lost any slim pretense of objectivity. At this point, the paper should expand its ad revenues by accepting full page fetal-gore advertisements from Operation Rescue and other domestic terrorist organizations. After all, that seems to be the readership being targeted.

Fun, right?

A few minutes after hitting submit, I got this email from Carlina Villalpandos, managing editor of my crappy local paper.

From: carlina.villalpando@dailytimes.com
Subject: Re: Letter to the Editor (online form)
Date: Fri, 16 Mar 2012 18:39:50 -0500
To: chrisfieldotherverse@hotmail.com

Actually, the strips we ran were those made available to us by the service we pay for. This was not an editorial decision to censor anything; it was a decision to use THE strips made available to us through a regular subscription as we do on a daily basis.

We have a front page centerpiece story planned for Monday about The Pregnancy Resource Center's fundraising efforts, and we have dedicated considerable space to this organization in recent years and will continue to do so.

If you would like to have further conversations about our editorial decision making, I welcome them. But please be assured that Doonesbury comic strips reflect absolutely no editorial stance on this newspaper's part.

Carlina Villalpando

Managing Editor

Kerrville Daily Times

429 Jefferson St.

Kerrville, TX 78028

(830) 257-0337 office

To this load of horseshit, I replied:
Mrs Villalpando,

You CHOSE the service you pay for. You chose a wire service without the integrity to run the Doonesbury strips, and I'm guessing if you gave me the name of the 'service you pay for', I could plug it into Google right now and find incident after incident of conservative bias.

I know you have devoted considerable space to the PRC and the 'good' it does. I've read those stories time and again, and been revolted each and every time. The question is: have you devoted one inch of page space to the harm the Pregnancy Resource Center, and the pro-life movement as a whole causes?

Don't just offer 'further conversations' about editorial policy. CHANGE THE EDITORIAL POLICY.
CHRIS

Soon enough, I got this tepid counter argument.....

Mr. Field,

We do not choose or pay for comics on a daily basis. They come to us based on a year's subscription.

I totally respect your views on such pregnancy centers and welcome your opinions on those in our letters to the editor. Our coverage of this center is not based on our newspaper's support of it but a reflection of the activities of our community, which has a wide range of interests and options. We have covered activities as the Stand For Life, but we would also cover events directly in opposition of that event if it happened locally.

Again, I take no issue with your opinion on this issue. My only concern with your letter is that it incorrectly assumes that the comic strips chosen in the last week is a reflection of an editorial stance on this topic, which it is not. When we take a stance on an issue, we do it in an editorial, so that we can be very clear readers understand the opinion we are setting forth and assuming as a paper.

Any other items you find on our op-ed page — from cartoons to guest columns to letters to the editor — are opinions of the artists, writers and readers, which we deliver to our readership in an attempt to share a variety of opinions — their opinions, not ours.

Again, I welcome your opinion in our letters forum and hope that you will share your views there. I just wanted to correct your flawed assumption about our editorial process.

Thanks,

Carlina

Carlina Villalpando

Managing Editor

Kerrville Daily Times

429 Jefferson St.

Kerrville, TX 78028

(830) 257-0337 office

And finally, I sent Villalpando this gem.....
You are passing the editorial buck. You're sending me e-mail after e-mail explaining why you didn't do your job.
You buy a years subscription of a comic from a vendor, fine. First, it seems obvious your vendor is cheating you, by not delivering these five cartoons as promised and instead sending you five crappy re-run cartoons instead. You were 'shorted' by your vendor, and I hope you take that into account when it is time to renew your subscription.

Second, you are a JOURNALIST, at least in theory. I saw the story about the Doonsebury cartooons on MSNBC.com. It took me about 20 seconds to find the article on the site's main page. It did not takes weeks of indepth research. I didn't have to go undercover to find this story. I turned it up with a single web search.

You, as someone PAID to report the news, might of thought to inquire to your vendor as to why your paper did not receive the cartoons in question. Second, you as managing editor might have gone out of your way to either A: acquire the genuine cartoons, or B: have the backbone to run a short, clarifying sidebar on the comics or editoral pages of the Daily Times, explaining to the readers why you CANNOT run the 5 strips. You choose option C: do nothing and hope nobody notices. That's cowardly, that's unprofessional, and that's despicable.

Second, the article on the PRC's 25th anniversary was not on the editoral page. Instead, it was in the local section, mixed in with the news. Since we're talking frankly, did the reporter who filed that story do any original work, or just accept whatever press release you were handed by the PRC?

CHRIS

I wonder if she'll reply again?
Anyway, you'll notice I did NOT redact Villalpando's contact info, if any of you feel like giving her a ring and letting her know, in great detail, just how full of horse-shit she is.

This shit is kinda fun.
CHRIS