Opinion Piece by Samuel Strait – January 30, 2017 – When I read the Triplicate’s OpEd on January 25th by Matthew Durkee, the Triplicate’s Managing Editor, titled “Your Community, Your Newspaper”, my mouth dropped open and I thought to myself, “No Way”, has Robin Fornoff folded his tent and left town. What a great New Year’s Present! Then reality struck, as I read the last couple of lines, and noticed it referring to 2015. Back to the top, it appears that this particular OpEd was originally produced in January 2015 before the arrival of Editor Fornoff. In a blink of an eye gone was the twice a month opportunity to write a letter to the editor, Gone was the 400 word limit. Gone was the unfettered ability to write meaningful letters of length. Gone was the ability to point out errors and misleading news stories, Gone was the whole purpose of having an opinion page in the local print paper. And finally gone is “Your Community, Your Newspaper”.
It seems that while December is ordinarily a rough month for the Newspaper’s Opinion and Letters, this year the paper has been especially hard pressed to receive new letters and has had to resort to other sources to fill the page. As such it has become an annual event for the Managing editor to update his 2015 appeal and plead for more material. As I have said in the pages of the Crescent City Times on numerous occasions with the occupation of the Triplicate editor’s chair by Robin Fornoff the opinion page and the paper as a whole has lost its standing as our communities newspaper for many people. A quick check of the paper has revealed that none of Editor Fornoff’s coda has been scrapped in order to reestablish it’s place in the community’s good graces. All of his limits seemed to have remained in place. No Happy New Year present after all.
In December,. when I happened on a few editorial pieces which were other than liberal and even a few letters that suggested a softening of Fornoff’s stance, I had a smidgen of hope. Granted the Triplicate’s news coverage remained as slanted as ever, but this past week has proven that “you can’t teach an old dog new tricks”, and we are right back to the same place with the Triplicate as before. The local Democratic Central Committee has cranked up it’s letter writing mill, and all the usual suspects are represented, Diane Collins, Craig Strong, Eli Naffah, and Diane Blackberry, all parroting the progressive talking points of the past election cycle.
So it is with great sadness that I report that the Triplicate’s OpEd, “Your Community, Your Newspaper” is a false hope and we are desperately in of a need major staff overhaul from top to bottom. As the visits to the Crescent City Times increase, the need for a print newspaper and the Triplicate diminishes. Mr. Durkee and the Triplicate will have to rely on the offices of the local Democratic Central Committee’s trolls to fill his opinion page. A sad thing for this community, when our one and only print newspaper remains tone deaf to the needs of the community. Try factual and objective reporting with no bias, and a return to an open forum on the opinion page without all the petty restrictions. Of course that doesn’t appear to be happening any time soon.
MARK TWAIN “Never pick a fight with someone who buys ink by the barrel”
I don’t know about you, Lin. Complain about lack of “free Speech” and Hitler like tactics, being not “okay” when it offends you or restricts your ability to speak your mind about things that you hold near and dear. But its not okay for people to not have the same privilege because the local editor at the newspaper restricts access to speak up because it offends his personal progressive agenda? Sounds to me like it is an ideal time to pick a fight “with someone who buys ink by the barrel”. Especially one, a member of the press, who abuses his “privileged right of free speech”! The local Triplicate is guilty of that well beyond “buying ink by the barrel”! How would you feel if you had been banned from writing a Letter to the Editor without cause? Merely because that same editor cannot rationalize any way of denying publication of your writings.
Just to add to the comments that I made earlier. Buying ink by the barrel no longer affords newspapers like the Triplicate a license for their brand of propaganda to be the only side out there. There are too many alternative places to put newspapers and TV reporting on notice and get another side of the story out to the public. The last election should have been a wake up to papers like the Triplicate that their propaganda wasn’t resonating with a large enough segment of the population that their favorite Democrat wasn’t elected. Looks to me like the same thing happened here. Air heads like Robin Fornoff have failed to realize that progressive theory hasn’t produced the wonderland that was promised way back when Bill Clinton was in office. Nothing like two thousand years of progressive governments crashing and burning to drive that point home. Progressive narratives like those found in the Triplicate thinly cloaked as news no longer passes the smell test for many readers, making Robin Fornoff’s editing much more vulnerable to alternative sources of news. So fearing the guy that buys oil by the barrel is not any longer much of a threat. I would think that if Robin doesn’t get back to reporting the news objectively, that he has much more to worry about.