By Donna Westfall – November 10, 2016 – It looks like the Triplicate is going down hill fast and losing subscribers by more than just a handful.  The latest one is newly re-elected Del Norte County Supervisor 1st District, Roger Gitlin.

In his letter to the Triplicate, he detailed the reason he is leaving the Triplicate. “The Triplicate has and continues to display poor editorial judgment, lack of objectivity, policy/rules exceptions, blatant bias, unethical practices and behavior below any level of reasonable journalistic standard.” He continued, “My continual requests to remediate this behavior has and continues to be ignored by your staff.”

We surmise that his action resulted in the most recent attempt to destroy his campaign for re-election.  On the last edition of the Triplicate before election day with no opportunity for him to respond, The Triplicate printed a front page story about his advertisement in a Slate Mailer that went to people registered as Democrats in his district.

This completely legal method of advertising has been a key method of getting the message out to those of all parties, and has been utilized by both Democrats and Republicans for the last 20 years in Del Norte County, but the Triplicate completely ignored this normal and accepted mode of advertising and attributed it to some underhanded and unethical method of advertising.

When confronted with this, the Triplicate said that numerous individuals had approached them saying that this was totally unethical.  Yet when we checked, we found that the ones who approached the Triplicate were members of the local Democratic Central committee in a orchestrated campaign to get the Triplicate to carry their message for them. They were joined by Linda Sutter, a Republican, who has tried to destroy Gitlin and Berkowitz ever since she lost her own Primary Election race.

The Triplicate made sure that Gitlin could not respond in a letter to the editor or a Coastal Voices piece due to the fact that the Triplicate said that no candidate for election could write anything in the newspaper before election.  Unfortunately they forgot to apply that same rule to Congressman Huffman who was up for re-election.  Remember, at the Triplicate, the rules are subject to change depending on the mood of the editor.

To further clarify, Gitlin said, “I stopped my subscription to the Triplicate.  This was done as a personal decision and on my personal stationary; and completely separate from my role as Supervisor or as a politician.”

We see a lot of justification for Roger Gitlin to sever his subscription ties to the Triplicate and suspect that a lot of other long time subscribers will do the same when they learn that the Triplicate seems to be controlled by the local Del Norte County Democratic Central Committee.