Maybe Sarah Palin could see Russia from her house -- but on my front porch, every morning, a view of Pravda-style reporting rolled up in the form of my local paper awaits me. In Kentucky, many conservatives jokingly call Louisville's paper, The Courier-Journal, the "The Communist Journal."
The liberal bias -- glaringly evident not just on the editorial page, but in the headlines, picture choices, placement of articles, and content -- is undeniable. Since I routinely catch up on the news via the Internet before opening the paper, I have found that it is the topics that the Courier doesn't report on at all that are the most damning. Whether due to censored content or lack of advertising revenue, the paper has lately gotten so small, the slightest wind blows it off porches, littering neighborhood yards with environmentally-friendly, recyclable bags.
Now, it appears the C-J will become even skinnier and more liberal. According to The Daily Caller, the paper's only regular conservative commentator, John David Dyche, has resigned.
Columnist John David Dyche told The Daily Caller Monday that he has written a bi-weekly column for the Louisville Courier-Journal for about a decade. He quit last week after editors refused to publish an opinion piece questioning the publication's apparent liberal bias.
Since Kentucky is home to what will probably be one of the most important and interesting political contests of 2014, you may want to hear what Dyche had to say about the bias of the state's most prominent paper. The "spiked" column was published by The Daily Caller on page 2 of its original story on Dyche's resignation here. An excerpt:
The Courier-Journal opinion pages are stridently liberal. Journalistic jihads against Kentucky's Republican U. S. Senators, Mitch McConnell and Rand Paul, and crusades for gun control and higher taxes, are in full force and frequently fill almost the entire editorial and op-ed pages. Such one-sidedness neither works in the marketplace nor serves the public interest.
According to the statement on Dyche's resignation by Pam Platt, the C-J's editorial director, "the marketplace of ideas is very much alive and well." Judging from her paper's decreasing size and recent downsizing of its staff by parent company Gannett, however, the Courier's health doesn't appear very rosy.
Platt justified her "spike" of Dyche's column with the remark: "I declined the column because one of its opening premises was just wrong."
And there you have it. The editorial director decided that the opinion of a long-time, prominent conservative contributor was "wrong," and instead of responding to Dyche's assertions in a column of her own or allowing an open discussion on the pages of the editorial section, simply censored the piece.
Platt's statement proved that Dyche's "opening premise" was exactly right. Dyche's piece was more than an editorial -- it was the truth. And there is no room for that in the dwindling pages of the C-J.
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