Friday, August 31, 2012

Friday Night Video Fights: Seedy Seeds vs. Seedy Seeds

So....This?

Or This?

MetroMix Print Edition to End with September 19th Issue

Just in time for launch of the Enquirer's NYT style Paywall for it's online content, the FREE weekly entertainment newspaper MetroMix is ending its print edition with the September 19th issue. It will instead be online and incorporated in a new redesigned website. Here is how the Enquirer article describes it:
We’re currently hard at work relaunching Cincinnati.com’s Entertainment channel – consider this the Extreme Makeover: Entertainment Edition. We’re going to combine all of our entertainment coverage into one easy-to-navigate web site.
I'm not sure how this will impact Cincinnati's entertainment industry, but I do know that it lessons the impact of having a cover story. The one thing a digital edition or website has difficulty doing is creating the impact on the reader, or casual passer by, that a cover story provides. This effect is similar to a front page headline on a daily newspaper, but for weekly or monthly publications, the cover takes on a different focus.

MetroMix provides a boost to certain events by running a cover story on it. I don't see the impact with anything that could be created online or in an email. The medium doesn't have the same type of interaction with readers. This is a loss. I don't know if will or can be replaced.

Wednesday, August 29, 2012

More Enquirer-Horstman Anti-Streetcar Bias

Another week and another biased anti-streetcar headline from the Enquirer. Here is the latest article: City threatens Duke over streetcar costs.

No where in the article does it say the City threatened Duke Energy. It states the City is “investigating potential legal remedy.” It also says that the City's inability to reach an agreement "threatens to pose significant cost risk" to the project.

It does not say the City is Threatening Duke Energy. The word threat is a bias created by someone at the Enquirer. I'd like to know who wrote it. Headline writing is much talked about and usually creates a frenzied finger pointing effort. Reporters point to Editors. Editors are mum or point to someone else. In this changed internet age, I have to ask, does a reporter submit a story without a title/headline? On most blogging software you have to have a title to the story when you post it, even in draft form. Is that what the Enquirer does? Does the reporter include a headline along with the story when submitted and it then is modified by a copy-editor, content-editor, or layout designer?

Did the word "Threatens" start with Horstman or was it added after? No one will likely ever take blame (or would it be credit?) for the misuse of the word. We just have live with the bias, but we can and must call them out when they fail to present the truth to their readers.

Tuesday, August 28, 2012

Republican Efforts to Suppress Democratic Voters Continue

I am glad that the Enquirer is covering the voter rights issue and that they exposed the insanity that is "True the Vote" group who held a summit that ending up being a conservative rally, including a Judicial Watch announcement of a legal effort to suppress Ohio voters.

Yes, Non-Ohio base groups are seeking to purge Ohio voter rolls based on the goal of suppressing Democratic voters. Any other claim is just lie (or at best a red herring).

The only thing I wish the Enquirer would do is just report the blatant efforts by Republicans to keep Democratic voters from voting. If nothing else they should be asking the questions and reporting the answers, demonstrating where their comments are lies or distortions. The article above hints at it, but the evidence is clear and it is not just extremists like Judicial Watch, it starts with the Republican Hamilton Country BOE members. They should be asked why they refused to keep keep the BOE open for longer periods of early voting? Why would they oppose that? The political parties, both of major parties, could pay the limited cost to keep the doors open a few more hours into the evening and weekends to help those with jobs that either make it difficult to vote or just won't let them. The latter is a blatant violation of the law.

As long as voter suppression efforts are allow to continue, our Democracy continues to crumble, a brick falling for every voter who is hindered from voting.

Sunday, August 26, 2012

Fire in Covington

Not sure what is burning, but it appears to NOT be a small fire. The smell of smoke and burnt material is strong at Smale Park, but the fire appears to be at least a mile away.

Friday, August 24, 2012

Wednesday, August 22, 2012

Cincinnati's Master Plan is Again About Being a City

CityBeat is reporting that the City has released it's final draft (how is a draft final?) of it's Master Plan. The key sentence from the CityBeat article that summarizes the main goal of the plan:
"The primary goal behind the plan is to transition the city away from a model that emphasizes suburban living back to a more urban model."
We as a city have come so far from ridding government with the 1950's mentality of development. We don't have the likes of Chris Monzel and John Cranley on council. The county is self destructing thanks to Monzel, but we can all be vigilant and keep Cranley from trying to drag Cincinnati back into the stone age with suburban style development ideas. We don't need any more strip malls. We don't need any more cul-du-sacs. We don't need streets that dont' allow safe walking and bike riding.

We are a city and we starting to act like it again. Don't let the Monzels or Canleys pull us off our path.

Tuesday, August 14, 2012

Is Winburn Lying Now or Back in 2010 (or Both)?

It would appear that Cincinnati City Council Member Charlie Winburn likes to lie. Yes, that comes as news to no one who has been following Cincinnati Politics any time over the last ten years, but this time it is a whopper. Winburn lied to someone about running for mayor. The only question is did he lie to the Business Courier this year or did he lie to the Cincinnati Enquirer back in 2010? Yes, it is fully possible he lied to both, but either way, he is being deceitful. He has broken a commandment. He is also toying with the idea that he could win. He obviously is delusional. I don't know if he thinks that Republicans will give him a ton of money and then convince all of the Republicans to ignore race, since they clearly did that in 2010. He also must assume that more blacks will vote on nothing but race and ignore the fact that he's a Republican.

I made it clear that I would not let him forget this when he said it. I am glad Quimbob has similar questions for Winburn. I hope everyone asks Winburn via email or social media when he was lying, now or then?

Thursday, August 09, 2012

Outraged Conservatives, Come to Findlay Market to Support Your Comrade!

I really hope all of the conservatives who are voicing outrage over a Findlay Market shop owner's hyperbolic anger about having her store included in a commercial for President Obama's, all come down to the Market! Please be sure to park in the many Findlay Market parking lots, they are priced ver reasonably. Be sure to pick up some produce, meats, coffee, sweets, and much more from the many fine vendors!Yes, conservatives, this shop is located in OTR and you will have walk at least a block near poor poeple, so be warned! I expect to see a line like Chick-Fil-A.In all seriousness, why did the owner of Krause's have to be such a jerk about the Commercial? She should know better than to let her store manager sign documents. Instead of going to the press about this, she could have just let it go quietly. Instead, she allowed this to build up the ignorance on the Enquirer's website. Way to annoy your neighbors!

Thursday, August 02, 2012

When did they become the Cincinnati Inquirer?

I understand that the Cincinnati Enquirer is changing to a tabloid size print edition, but when are they changing their name to the Cincinnati Inquirer? They might as well do that if they are going to print crap like this story about Council member Chris Seelbach.

This story has no point. It is reporting gossip from the comments from the online news article and then tries to link that to facts to point to no conclusion, but to embarrass someone who was just the victim of a crime. Seelbach was disorientated and had a broken foot and 'people' are 'upset' he mentioned he was a member of council a few times to the 911 operator. Gee, maybe the man who attacked him was doing so because he was a member of council, the first openly gay council member. Did that fact run across the reporter's mind? Instead they sought to trace

To top it off, they got a quote from Mark Miller. Seriously, the lone guy who allegedly lives in Hyde Park from COAST is a relevant source for this story? How? Please, someone tell me what caused the reporter to reach into a big pile of irrelevant sources and pulled out Mark Miller's name. If the Enquirer wants to play the tawdrily game it is playing, I hope they asked Miller where he was Monday Night. Instead they gave a political foe of Seelbach the chance to gloat and make fun of him for being the victim of a crime. That sounds like the COAST I know, too bad the Report is either ignorant of COAST or shares the desire to allow COAST's gossip to make it to print. His point wasn't even valid, he was comparing this to Laketa Cole incident where she was with a person being ticketed. Seelbach was clearly the victim of a crime, he did nothing wrong. Miller is trying to damage him and the Enqurier, and the reporters, let him take a shot. There didn't appear to be an editor around to stop this either.

Also, why did they story include a sentence that mentioned where Miller lived? They quoted another people, but didn't state where they lived. What was the relevance? Is it actually true that he lives in Hyde Park?

Finally, they Enquirer again created another false equivalency. The only way to find any sense in this story is to view it as reporting an online flame war. The Enquirer got juicey quotes from both political sides and falsely feels they reported a fair and balanced story. The problem is that this isn't a political story. This is a crime story. Why not write about the crime? Write about what the police know or don't know. We don't need to have stories about Facebook comments. We really could use some news stories that would require the reporters to leave the newsroom.

Enquirer In the Bag for Chick-Fil-A (and Conservative Readers)

Yes, you know who butters the Enquirer's bread, that would be the shrinking readership who are a majority conservative. The over-coverage of yesterday's Chick-Fil-A still avoid the fact that the LOCAL Chick-Fil-A Restaurants in West Chester and Deerfield Township sponsered a CCV event. Yes, CCV is the anti-gay rights group that fought for Article XII and against its repleal as well as lead the charge in the anti-gay rights anti-gay marriage ban that passed in Ohio. How does this not make the story?

Why doesn't the Enquirer report this?  Why are they making this boycott about free speech?  That's not what this is about, this is about the corporate actions of a company, not just the private views of the owners.  That contradicts the rants of conservatives, who want this to be about liberals being  "anti-Christian."

Wednesday, August 01, 2012

Enquirer Blog Falls into False Equivalency Trap

I know journalists often look at the political world and try to find two equally opposing viewpoints to compare and then pretend to be objective. That type of action is a false equivalency, see a description of what that is here. The problem is that most of the time, the viewpoints are not equal, they are not the same.

Take yesterday's Enquirer political blog story: Mixing food with politics: What do you think?. The blog post, wrapped around an online poll, tries to marry two topics together: 1) those boycotting Chick-Fil-A for providing financial support to anti-gay groups and 2) The mythical hoards of people who might no longer want to go the Montgomery Inn because the owners took a public political opinion in the Presidential race. The two don't equate. For many reasons:
  1. One is real, the other is speculation.
  2. One is a national effort and one is a mythical-hypothetical local situation.
  3. One is about bigotry and the other is about political opinion.
Number three above is key.  The boycott of Chick-Fil-A, which I participate in, is about the financial support Chick-Fil-A gives to groups like the CCV, the Cincinnati area's own anti-gay bigoted hate group.  This is being treated as a political issue by many conservatives, not a moral issue, and that is the clear false equivalency being allowed to fester by the media.

If a national fast food chain were to sponsor a golf tournament for a white supremacist group, would anyone try to compare a boycott of that fast food chain to what the Montgomery is doing?  No, the media would instead help expose the fast food chain's actions.

Gay rights are civil rights and the CINCINNATI media needs to understand that issue better and more importantly get on the moral side of it.  If too many of your readers are anti-gay bigots, tough shit, be journalists, don't be accomplices in the oppression of gays and lesbians.

We have bigotry in this community happening out in the open and our media far too often lets is slide unnoticed, or in the case of the Enquirer, lets it slide all the time.

The other bad part of the article was that it was talking about an event supposed to take place yesterday where the Republican Governor of Oklahoma was coming to appear with one of the Owners of the Montgomery Inn at their Boathouse location on the river.  This event was a Mitt Romney "We Did Build This” campaign event pushing a lie about the President that falsely claims the President said that small business owners don't build their businesses alone, the government helps. That's not what the president said, but it is the story line that should have been asked of the Governor and the owners of the Montgomery Inn. They should have been asked: Who owns the building where the Boathouse Location resides? The answer is the City of Cincinnati, or as the website says "Cincinnati City Of." I don't think that question was asked, nor asked how much help the people of the City were back in the late 1980's to the suburban based company.  I am just wondering how much hypocrisy you get with a full slab of ribs?

So the Enquirer missed the real story and tried to create one that just wasn't true. Bad day for Journalism.