Since Columbus never had the kind of big-money industrialists that ruled things in cities like Cleveland, Detroit, Pittsburgh or Cincinnati, the economic power here has always been with land developers and retailers, and the big names in those industries were the power brokers. One of them is the Wolfe family.

The Dispatch can be thought of as one of the retail businesses in the Wolfe family portfolio. Hard hitting investigative reporting is much less important than running a profitable business and promoting consumer confidence.

PL

I have worked around or for newspapers for about 15 years as well as covering state and federal campaign finance issues.

It has always been my understanding that political donations by business side staff is fine because they don’t write the stories or determine the newspapers agenda.

I don’t know the details of this case, but it is likely that an associate publisher doesn’t even have anything to do with the editorial page. I agree it is unseemly at that level, but that has always been the rule.

Short form: separation of church and state.

Long form: Editors and Publishers live in different worlds — editors in the world of their readers; publishers in the world of their advertisers.

The world of publishers is a world of money. You wine, dine (and engage in other adult activities) with your advertisers in order to convince them to give up advertising dollars.

And, you have to spend money to make money.

Sadly, as competition for ad dollars has increased, the dead-tree media has systematically removed bricks from the wall.

A journalist at the helm of the newspaper-where-editors-go-to-retire is looking toward that pension check and not a Pulitzer Prize..

(Speaking of Pulitzers, why is that our own Pulitzer winning journalist remained on staff, and, if I recall correctly, continued to write matters directly related to her husband’s senate race?)

The bottom line for me is that as long as editorial decisions are governed by advertisers, or people who influence advertisers, the concept of a free and vigorous is a fairy tale.

B’shalom,

Jeff

Paper are political, the PD is a conservative paper.

They endorse LaTourette, they can make whatever rules they want and when you say no, it is insubordination, correct.

Paper are biased, news shows are biased…subtle about it but biased just the same.

Nobody in the PD would or could write about LaTourette negatively, they covered Ney, Abramoff and Delay but they would rather have not, they are admittedly conservative.

Somebody in the PD said that is enough, we are at odds with our own!

They run AP pieces all the time…but they are not going to run ones that are overtly Liberal. People contributing to campaigns, for sure, write those articles but it does not conflict with the paper agenda.

They set up a rule after the fact, you contributed to campaigns and the others did not, how convenient liberal on one side and conservatives on the other.

Funny how the network works, it serves itself. It makes it look like something else.

You try to get people to look at thing from all angles, then make a decision…some do not they want to tell people how to think.

Everything is wrong with the good old boy network…unless you are in it.