Of course, nowhere in his response/refusal to print does he adequately explain what was “factually incorrect” about my letter, nor why the Mayor was accorded the additional wordage as I cannot find any where in his “strict policies” that because someone in the story that be granted absolution to the 300 word limit.  It also seems to me that if the Title on the front page of the Triplicate is inaccurate how can the story be anything other than factually incorrect.  Once again he accuses me of being “factually incorrect and making inaccurate assumptions” then fails to mention what facts/ assumptions in my letter are inaccurate or incorrect.  Finally, his apparent disdain for the Crescent City Times is highly amusing.  Jealousy perhaps?  I am more than amused by his assertion that the Triplicate is a bastion of fairness or facts.  He needs to get out a bit more into the community.

Herein is our email exchange: June 14th –

Dear Editor Fornoff,

Since the circumstances bears such striking similarity to a letter (Letter Submittal February 9th, 2016) that I submitted to your kind offices, I would like to pen the following such that you may have the first opportunity to refuse publication as you did on February 9,2016.  As Follows:

It would appear that the common folk in Del Norte County when writing Letters to the Editor, do not receive the same consideration as do the political elite, past and present.  Not only must we contrive to hold our wordiness to 300 words or less when responding to lengthy articles written on the front page of the Triplicate, but we must also refrain from naming said reporter before  taking the reporter of record to task.  It would be wonderful, if our esteemed and current editor would apply his strict editorial policies in a more even fashion, but it would appear that certain circumstances require the tightening of policy and refusal to publish, while others do not.

What I am referring to is a recently published letter, found in Saturday’s issue of the Triplicate, where our Lord Mayor was given free reign and words to display his angst about sloppy and factually incorrect reporting in the Triplicate.  While he did not mention the reporter by name, enough information was supplied as to not require the services of a genius to know her identity.  I am wondering where the word, bully. has suddenly vanished from Editor Fornoff’s vocabulary.
Similarly, I seem to be missing the phrase, we stand behind our story, or we are this community’s watchdog.

While I understand some of the difficulties faced by Editor Fornoff, they are so often of his own making.  Stories provided by reporters that appear in the Triplicate regularly fail to be news but rather narratives and as such do more harm than good.  I am not quite sure of how this benefits either Editor Fornoff, or the Triplicate, but it has indeed established enough confusion in this community that in a recent candidate’s forum, one candidate questioned the continued publication of negative narratives in the paper.  That in itself should be a wake up call that things need to change at the Triplicate.  At this point this onus is on the editorial staff at the paper to change what you are doing so that you might return to being trusted as the community’s watchdog.

Samuel,