More Spellane Faux News

Today's story in the T&G (the fourth in the T&G's six day smear series) is yet another example of how to de-stress and/or completely omit pertinent facts, so that spin can be disguised as "news". Today they're doing their best to de-stress party politics in the State of Massachusetts, while pimping the eleventh hour Democratic Party candidate.

Just keep in mind that this is, essentially, a one party state.

Not once in today's article will you find the words "democrat" or "republican" or anything about party affiliations, connections, or "camps" even hinted at. They didn't even bother with the requisite "(D)" that should be used to specify which party "Rep. Robert P. Spellane" might belong to in the very first sentence of the article. This wholesale de-stressing and/or complete omission of pertinent facts to spin up a newspaper story is something that the T&G excels at, however. It's especially egregious when they do it in a day by day series like this, too.

I would easily assume that the Republican Party, the Libertarian Party, the Green Party, the Constitution Party, and even the Hockey Moms of Tatnuck Party and the Volvo Owners Club of Paxton don't have an eleventh hour candidate to jump into this race because ...mounting a campaign takes a lot of work, a lot of time, and a lot of fundraising beforehand. In other words, the only eleventh hour candidates that obviously have all that work behind them are the two Democrats that magically showed up less than 24 hours after the story first "broke" on Sunday.

And now, those two have magically merged into one. Absolutely amazing, isn't it?

Here it is just under a week after all that old news about Spellane "broke" in the paper, and potentially viable non-Dem candidates STILL haven't had enough time to organize, come up with a candidate, or find their way to getting some coverage in the paper.

But the Democrats were able to do all that in less than 24 hours. And not just for one candidate, but TWO Democrats that were touted by the T&G as running against each other only a couple of days ago, but who are now best buddies and have agreed to merge into ONE Democrat vying for Spellane's seat a few days later... Uncanny, isn't it?

Unseating Spellane and just tossing another Democrat into that spot could easily become a fait accompli, all just because of the precision timing of Sunday's so-called "news" reporting at the T&G. And all this would appear to accomplish is changing the representation for that district from a five term seniority status to a freshman status in next year's General Court. In other words, it appears that it won't change a damn thing on Beacon Hill, but it will erase the seniority, and thereby drastically reduce the effectiveness of representation in the 13th Worcester district.

Why? Why would the Democrats want to do that?

The tacit assumption that nobody at the T&G had any slightest clue about any of the dirt reported on Sunday until "just now" is simply not credible. That a veteran reporter (or anyone else at the T&G, for that matter) was completely oblivious of ANY of the elements of Sunday's supposed "revelations" about Spellane until this past week is simply beyond belief.

The issues concerning Spellane reported on Sunday unfolded over several months, possibly a year or more, before this past weekend. If they had been reported in a timely fashion, back when each item really was "news", then Spellane would have had to either satisfactorily explain to his constituency the balance of the story, or go down in flames long before this. Timely reporting would have given the voters a chance to understand and digest what actually happened in regard to each separate item, one at a time. And most important of all, timely reporting of each element as it actually unfolded probably would have opened the door really wide for a non-Dem candidate surfacing in that district. But lumping all that time into "right now" by completely de-stressing the chronology of the items in Sunday's story, and springing it all upon the public two weeks before the election like this...

In my eyes, this whole thing just stinks like rotting fish, from end to end. This crap does not "inform the public" at all. The timing and the spin does exactly the opposite, and THAT is an extreme disservice to the public, as far as I'm concerned.

No matter which way you want to slice this story up, it just doesn't add up to straight, timely, OR complete news reporting.

This is why I don't trust the T&G. And if I was alone in my distrust, I'd expect that the T&G's revenues wouldn't be dropping like a rock, month after month, year after year.