Today's Scranton Times contains a piece by Borys Krawczeniuk on the huge amounts of corporate PAC, lobbyist and lawyer moneys pouring into the Santorum and Casey campaigns. (That's nice, but we and many others have covered that before.) It is what the article doesn't say which is galling. In a supposed "investigative" report on the money ties these two professional politicians have, nowhere is there any mention of the hundreds of thousands of dollars which the owners of the Scranton Times have shoved into Casey's pockets over the years.
It is unusual, to say the least, for owners and editors of newspapers to be so heavily invested in a political candidate which their papers is supposed to objectively cover. A search of the FEC database reveals zero contributions to political candidates from any of the other NEPA newspaper owners, editors and reporting staff. Besides handing over wads of cash, and never providing a disclaimer to their readers, the owners of the Scranton Times have also engaged in dubious advertising of their newspaper which featured falsified headlines touting Casey, which some have said were illegal campaign donations.
All that is fine and, while giving tons of money to a politician is more than a little questionable from the standpoint of journalistic ethics, it is (mostly) legal. But for the Scranton Times to pretend to objectively cover the Senate Race without disclosing to their readers the stake that the ownership of the newspaper has in the outcome is journalistic fraud. They should be ashamed, except they are from NEPA where we hear that such things are rather routine.
It is unusual, to say the least, for owners and editors of newspapers to be so heavily invested in a political candidate which their papers is supposed to objectively cover. A search of the FEC database reveals zero contributions to political candidates from any of the other NEPA newspaper owners, editors and reporting staff. Besides handing over wads of cash, and never providing a disclaimer to their readers, the owners of the Scranton Times have also engaged in dubious advertising of their newspaper which featured falsified headlines touting Casey, which some have said were illegal campaign donations.
All that is fine and, while giving tons of money to a politician is more than a little questionable from the standpoint of journalistic ethics, it is (mostly) legal. But for the Scranton Times to pretend to objectively cover the Senate Race without disclosing to their readers the stake that the ownership of the newspaper has in the outcome is journalistic fraud. They should be ashamed, except they are from NEPA where we hear that such things are rather routine.
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