Yo, Kansas City Star — Why Didn’t You Publish These Letters?
March 19, 2011 at 9:08 AM 1 comment
My friend ChrisH sent these two letters (below) to the Kansas City Star newspaper.
Insofar as the Star didn’t see fit to publish them, I’m publishing them here.
October 22, 2010:
In his letter Friday 10/22/10, Derrick Sontag of Americans for Prosperity defends his organization as a “non-partisan, grassroots-driven organization that advocates for limited government and free market principles” and denies it is a “a front group for large corporations.” Methinks he doth protest too much.
According to Sourcewatch.com the group is
“…an astroturf front group started by oil billioniare David Koch and Richard Fink (a member of the board of directors of Koch Industries ). AFP works together with the Koch family’s other conservative foundations and think tanks .”
There is much more information that puts the lie to Mr. Sontag’s assertions of people-powered rebellion. There may be 4.5 million members/supporters, as he says, but they did not grow this organization. They are merely the very useful face of it.I urge all interested voters to utilize Sourcewatch to find out straightforward and documented facts about the fascinating web of money and corporate interests that operates behind American politics.
Chris H
March 13, 2011:
In October 2010, before the critical elections that turned the House of Representatives over to Republicans, I wrote a letter to The Star rebutting Derrick Sontag’s (10/22/10) contention that his Americans for Prosperity was “not a front group for large corporations,” and provided links to the website Sourcewatch.com that detailed the so-called grassroots organizations’ umbilical cord to the Koch brothers. Unfortunately, that letter of mine was never printed and voters were not made aware of a valuable resource that would have shed some light on exactly who they were voting into power.
Now we see, in Wisconsin and seeping across the nation, who Americans for Prosperity were really representing – it’s not you, not me, not the working class, and not the middle class. I denounce The Kansas City Star for only printing one side of a crucial issue and not doing a better job of informing its readers, which is, presumably, its mission.
Of course, this will never see print either.
Chris H
It’s no wonder corporate hacks manage to slither into office. Our media doesn’t educate and inform us about them, their background and their backers so all we know is what their glitzy, sanitized campaign ads and fliers tell us.
Entry filed under: 2010 Election, Chrish, Corporatocracy, Dumbed Down, Print Media, Republicans, Including Wingers & "Moderates", The "Liberal Media", We the People. Tags: .
1.
Gene W. DeVaux | November 8, 2011 at 6:19 PM
Chris, you are not the only letter writer whose letter would not be published. I have been blackballed for about three years. The Star seems to want to publish letters from the so-called conservative writers. Derek Donovan wrote in an Ad Astrum post about a writer who complained that his letter was not posted. Donovan wrote: “His problem with getting published was probably that he was writing about an extremely common letter topic: Support for Barack Obama and criticism of John McCain.There is no shortage of material for the letters editor to choose from on that subject.” Parenthetically he wrote: “(The paper has had a problem with getting enough good conservative letters for years. I’ve seen it firsthand.)”
That has not been my observation. The Star publishes more letters from conservatives than from any other group. According to Donovan, the editor could have published a full page of anti- McCain/Palin letters every day with the volume of mail that she was receiving. I called a previous letters editor who told me that the Star wanted to present a balance in the letters column. Using that logic if Star received more anti-McCain mail then they had to balance it out with pro-McCain mail even though the volume of letters was clearly going against McCain. That does not reflect what the public was writing and that made it appear that McCain had more support than he really had. The Star is obviously biased.
Read Donovan’s remarks at: http://adastrum.kansascity.com/?q=node/350