This entry is brought to you by yet another example of Responsible Journalism beset by her ugly step-sister, Unethical Reporting. You might have heard by now about Oklahoma Republican Senator Steve Russell authoring a bill to opt Oklahoma out of the federal law protecting people from hate crimes based on, among other things, their gender and sexual orientations. In other words, he was voting to take hate crime protection away from the GLBT community. That story on that can be found here.
That in and of itself is straight up ridikulus ("ri-dik-uh-luss") but, to take matters from abominable to comical, Senator "Gays are the New Necrophiles" Russell mislabeled the statutes in the bill and actually took hate crimes protection away from people based on their religion, not sexual orientation. The story, broken by Oklahoma Daily reporter Ricky Maranon in late March of this year, can be found here.
There's the most rudimentary version of the background on my rant.
National GLBT newspaper The Advocate published an oddly similar version of Ricky's story just six days later. Ricky received credit for breaking this story from both other local and national news sources that followed up on it. However, The Advocate reporter Michelle Garcia used an unattributed quote Ricky said came directly from his story - "a legislative error". Except for the last paragraph and quote, her entire report reads like a summary of Ricky's original yet nowhere in Garcia's story does she give him one bit of credit, either for breaking it or for the information he said she took from it. You can read the stories and be your own judge but, since this is a blog, I will go on record as saying that it looks to me like some Grand Theft Byline went down on Michelle Garcia's part.
You can read Ricky's Cease and Desist letter to The Advocate for further explanation on the background and exactly why/how he believes Mrs. Garcia done messed up.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment