MEDIA WATCH | MERCURY NEWS

Welcome to the Tabloid Section, Mercury News

“Anonymous” sources are expected in supermarket tabloids, the category you now fall into. Congratulations.

July 16, 2020

Frank Pine
Executive Editor
Bay Area News Group
editor@bayareanewsgroup.com

Dear Mr. Pine,

On Sunday last a young man tragically committed suicide. And without missing a beat, a rabid anti-Scientology bigot twisted the story citing only anonymous sources so that this “blogger” could trash our religion and blame our church for somehow causing this horrible death.

And apparently you picked up and ran this piece of trash “article” without considering the source, who never named his source. “Anonymous” sources are expected in supermarket tabloids, the category you now fall into. Congratulations.

So welcome to the supermarket check-out line, where we read about how Hillary Clinton was abducted by aliens and Elvis was sighted once again in New Jersey—or was it Honolulu?

How does it feel to be a modern-day freak show?

And all of this started literally one day after a young man’s family suffered this tragic loss.

Sick.

But then as Willam Randolph Hearst answered when Fatty Arbuckle, an innocent man, asked why Hearst had deliberately destroyed Arbuckle’s life and career: “It sells papers.”

You are cut from the same cloth as Hearst was. No wonder the media in general is reviled.

You can either decide to be a true news outlet—and report news as it is with named sources and facts that prove out and thus retain some shred of credibility—or you can hang out in the supermarket side show with the Elvis and Bigfoot sightings until you go under because of your complete journalistic irresponsibility.

It is really all the same to us.

Yours,

Chris Sobolev
STAND Member

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