The guy is a frickin' genius. So smart that they rushed him through high school. I think he graduated when he was 9. He went to both Muhlenberg and University of Pennsylvania Law School on academic scholarships. At age 90, he still practices law and is still winning cases in Allentown. He reads voraciously, and can quote from poems like Oscar Wilde's Reading Gaol once the Sangria (his favorite vitamin) kicks in.
Though gifted genetically, he does have some flaws. He's a terrible Hearts player. And despite his intelligence, he's an unabashed conservative. My life's mission is to bring him and his wife back from the Dark Side.
He recently sent a letter to the editor to The Morning Call, the Lehigh Valley's largest daily. He criticizes the newspaper for its "far left leaning" proclivity in headlines, columns and even cartoon selections. You can read his brief missive below.
Whether Bill's criticism is correct is irrelevant to me. What disturbs me is that the newspaper has failed to even acknowledge receipt. That reflects a disdain for nearly all the customers it is supposed to serve. The result is fewer subscriptions, ads and reporters to keep you informed. In short, it's bad business.
Bill Malkames LTE by BernieOHare on Scribd
Morning call is a left-wing piece of shit.
ReplyDeleteThat’s ridiculous. The paper has no discernible strategy of any sort, related to anything.
DeleteBernie - Thanks for covering the story about the Call’s bias. It’s a shame that it’s two decades too late.
ReplyDeleteI put the MC in my parrakeets cage. She went on a hunger strike.
ReplyDeleteI worked for MCall for several years - sales. Waiting for a noncompete to expire. It's one of the most corrupt organizations I ever set foot inside. Degenerate employees, corrupt managers, and a toxic environment squashing any sense of creativity or originality. Guess that's to be expected when your largest local newspaper isn't owned or operated locally. MCall keeps throwing their papers in my yard (that I don't want and don't pay for). I see they still throw paper around the community claiming to have subscribers.
ReplyDeleteYes, the Morning Call is a LOUSY newspaper. It is over-priced and over-biased politically. I know, having subscribed for home deliver for more than 50 years of its continuing decline.
ReplyDeleteFor goodness sake, don’t go to the Morning Call for trustworthy political data and commentary. All of that is piped-in from known big government supporting “news” conglomerates who curate things to support a mostly Democrat/Socialist/Marxist viewpoint. If that’s your thing, enjoy!
I really believe the remaining handful of local Morning Call employees with any decision-making authority are very minor players who have no real control over improving the content of what appears on those pages. After all, it’s the paycheck that most be protected, not the country.
The truth about your world, your life, etc. must come from the daily life YOU live. Not what someone tells you. Your instincts, your personal experiences are truth. As examples, my life shows me massive price inflation NOT under control. It shows me a dangerous wide open border that IS bankrupting some of our cities as the welfare state of America continues to grow, and will cost ME money. These issues are what lying and censorship deals with.
OK, enough of this. You want to talk about Hollywood and sports !
Morning call is a rag. Its only good for starting my charcoal fires, fish wrap and lining a bird cage. Much like the New York Slimes and Washington Compost
ReplyDeleteI noticed the same thing. It was a general interest article that could have just as easily had a headline something like "Rich immigrant Trump supporter buys collector shoes."
ReplyDeleteThe "degenerate collector" line was a simple self-deprecating throw-away line by the guy that the headline writer chose to focus on.
8:53 AM, I disagree that the MC is too incompetent to have a bias (perhaps you needed a /sarc at the end)?. When virtually 100% of its national reporting is from the AP or New York Times and the lead op-ed writer is Krugman, it's incomprehensible that anyone would call the MC unbiased. Since almost all of the local reporting is high school sports, maybe that's what the "bias raters" look at?
When the paper excuses the slant of the LTE's by claiming "those are just the ones we receive," this story and Michael Molovinsky's well-documented experiences clearly show that the paper exercises "Editorial Control" over the nature of letters published.
Of course it does. How could it not?
Delete9:45. How could it not be too incompetent?
DeleteMost recent exhibit A:
ReplyDeleteSaturday, March sixteenth's front page, headline below the fold.
The headline in columns five and six, below the fold reads as follows:
"Developer keeps up battle over building’s height"
What critical word does NOT appear ANYWHERE in the body of the article?
"height"
What word does appear THREE times in the article, and should have been in the headline instead?
"length"
Sadly, I have become desensitized to the missing articles of speech in almost every issue of this paper (the, an, a , etc.). Misspellings of the deceased's last name in obituaries appears to be the latest symptom of the decay of American journalism.
However page one headline errors such as this give the appearance that either they have no editors who understand the English language, or that there are few people at the Morning Call who have the slightest idea what is going on in the City of Bethlehem.
Maybe, to promote interest in the paper, and improve the quality of the product, the Morning Call should consider crowd-sourcing editing by having a group of vetted readers proofread articles and make suggestions (grammatical, and even factual) to improve the piece.
Hoping the Morning Call figures out something before the paper disappears completely, as have so many others across our once literate nation.
1909=2,600 daily papers (highest number in American history)
1970=1,748 dailies
1990=1,611
2000=1,480
2012=1,381
2018=1,279
I cannot find any figures for years after 2018....maybe no news is good news?
The Morning Call's decline was obvious over fifteen years ago when it went decidedly more left leaning in its commentary and editorial control. The thought they balanced that with one or two conservative syndicated columnists.
ReplyDeleteAt just about the same time print was collapsing under the weight of the internet. For years the Morning Call has been a "dead man walking" but neither the various ownership groups nor the readers may have realized it. No one on a strategic level ever looked at whether the Call was editorially diverse and whether it was a community watchdog. It was not. The journalism got lost a long time ago. For years, and still the case today, most articles are just third party press releases that are barely repackaged.
We kept the subscription way longer than we should have- it is not missed. We still receive the WSJ so we still appreciate a daily paper, just one that still makes some attempt at being journalism. For a while WFMZ web page was doing a better job at local journalism, but its writers have gotten lazy and have adopted the repackaged press release strategy. Lehigh Valley News is made up of Morning Call alumni or recent grads of modern journalism school so it suffers the same faults as the morning call. Given it is published under the auspices of the local Public TV station and thinks NPR is a balanced viewpoint, it suffers the same affliction as the call and public tv.
Bill Malkames is a good man and good lawyer (The former being the more important of the two respectable qualities.)
Do these people who write these comments really buy the Morning Call? I think not.
ReplyDeleteWell, 9:25, you think wrong. I’ve been a daily subscriber for an about 50 years. Before that, I was one of their newspaper carriers.
ReplyDeleteWhat’s happened over time, especially since Obama revised the long-standing Smith-Mundt Act, our government and its various departments are permitted to use propaganda in their information releases. It also exercises undue influences over the commercial news industry. The CIA has its mouthpieces, the FBI another, etc. Censorship of details contrary to certain political narratives is also a regular tool. All of the above under the (not so) watchful eyes of the daily media entering your home.
It is almost pointless to simply repeat that which someone else claims. We are on our own to determine what is accurate.
We were full subscribers to the Morning Crawl for decades. We dropped our subscription as we became increasingly frustrated with their liberal bias with national news sources and editorials. It is now so pathetic that most local news is reported by stringers, and advertising revenue keeps sliding away. It has become so devoid of meaningful content that you could throw an issue up in the air and read it all on the way down.
ReplyDeleteMy hunch is that they didn't publish it because it contains a bulleted list. As far as acknowledgement goes, speaking from experience, when you submit via the form on the their site, it does give you an automatic confirmation reply (much like this blog does). If he emailed it, I do not not know if there is an auto-confirm message or not. If he snail-mailed it, who knows.
ReplyDelete95% of the media is left-wing. They lie to the American people 100% of the time. The Morning call is a great example the people running that paper are running it into the ground lucky for us it will not be going in a few years
ReplyDeleteThe obituaries are still OK. I think they're written from boilerplate forms at the funeral homes, though. The sports page is mostly gone. A couple of writers do a couple of local sports. But it hasn't been a place to get timely or meaty sports information for several years. Many writers jumped ship until the lingering underperformers were thrown out of their building to await replacement by AI. Newspapers and their digital successors were already on the endangered list before the hubris of wokism finished them off with an hilarious whimper. Let's not grieve the demise of those who brought us such classics as ignoring the Pawlowski graft until two local bloggers embarrassed the "professionals." You deserve to lose your jobs and go out of business for that stunning malpractice.
ReplyDelete12:44 - the puppet masters behind the Tribune Group might be heavily funding the Morning Call to keep it afloat regardless of inadequate subscription and advertising revenue. I have no idea if this is the case but wouldn’t be surprised. Some of our esteemed politicians appear to be heavily funded ‘behind the scenes’ in a similar manner.
ReplyDeleteI would certainly like to see the Morning Call continue as part of my day. But, a much different kind of Morning Call. One that is better balanced politically and with a greater abundance of solid, LOCAL content.
Left-leaning media became victims of the transparency to which they paid lots of lip service, but desperately fought against. New media may be crass and unwieldy. But at least some of it is probably true. The same can't be said of The Mornig Call, anymore.
ReplyDeleteIf only the Morning Call could just print liberal left wing Obituaries, their mission would be complete and the paper could die happy. My favorite chapter of this story is how numerous far left columnists and editors put out of work due to declining Morning Call readership, went directly to work at local college and university journalism departments to indoctrinate the next generation of media professionals to continue the devastating cycle of single perspective (liberal/left wing propaganda) news coverage.
ReplyDeleteA left wing newspaper that occasionally throws crumbs to softly written letters to the editor. A disgrace!
ReplyDelete@ 12:44
ReplyDeleteWho cares about the local Morning Call newspaper, if I want disinformation I look at this blog for local misinformation. What I care about is how Fox News is misrepresenting the facts and how they are presenting themselves as a news media organization. What a joke, they would do well as a communist party news outlet for Russia. Let’s start talking about facts not the lies Fox tells their viewers who are either gullible and ignorant or just want tax breaks for themselves. Trump is a con man, who shouldn’t be in any position of power or leadership, ever even when he became president in 2016. He’s a traitor, criminal, psychopath, that is ruining the fabric of our country and is lowering our standard of civility, dignity, decency and respect for all Americans. So when somebody complains about the Morning Call then let’s hear about the other side which is 100 time worse.
6:04 - I didn't realize Fox News covered Allentown. I'll have to look for it.
DeleteHeadline writers write titles like clickbait on social media, often not reflecting the attached article. As for the opinion writers in the Morning Call, they often print right wing opinions from people connected to the Heritage Foundation, conservative columnists Ross Doughat, David Brody, Jonah Goldgerg, and others, localy George Heitzman, James Largay, and O’Brian, among others. As someone who actually reads the paper, I see both right and left represented. I am saddened that the paper has shrunk, and has very limited local coverage, but it is still better than no paper at all.
ReplyDelete6:04 What I care about is how Fox News is misrepresenting the facts
ReplyDeleteI couldn't agree with you more when Fox got Russiagate wrong, Whipgate at the border wrong, Covington Kids wrong, Russia bounty on US soldiers wrong, Transitory inflation wrong, Hunter Biden laptop was Russian dis info was wrong. Oh wait that was CNN/MSNBC that was WRONG. But go ahead keep being lied to and stupid enough to watch these networks.
That's so funny I peed my dossier.
ReplyDelete"... conservative columnists Ross Doughat (sic), David Brody, Jonah Goldgerg (sic) ..."
ReplyDeleteThis is a collection of never-Trump, Nikki Haley, RINO types. That's what conservatism looks like to The Call's wishful thinking lefties.