There is nothing more frightful than ignorance in action.
Johann von Goethe
Goethe never read the Journal or Post!
Once a week a paper comes out in town and brings in its pages news from our town. Two other papers are printed and thrown in town - one daily, and one about four times a week. Lee Enterprises owns the latter two.
Combined, the papers of Lee have a huge staff and still the First Capitol News scoops them again and again! Sometimes the big guys will go ahead and print a little story after the First Capitol News has scooped them and other times they simply ignore the story that FCN beats them to — so, you can figure that that means most of the time!
Papers certainly do have a bias, no doubt about it and this has been made clear time and again by the editorials of the Suburban Journal. An advertisement publication by nature, rarely these guys have much to say about local politics with the exception of the occasional attack on some of the Council in St. Charles. I hope that the FCN has a bias of working for better local government! Many people in town put their trust in this paper for stories that mean something to our residents.
Take a look out onto the horizon. Do you see it? Right there in front of you! It’s our friends of the local ad sheets preparing to do battle with the “bad guys” on the Council. You can already read the editorials - “Clean House at City Hall”; “Recall ‘em All”; or “Support our advertisers - fight the ‘Fab Five.” You probably won’t see that last one, but it would be a lot more accurate than some of the lousy editorials we have seen from these folks the past two years.
I cannot blame Lee Enterprises for standing up for their advertisers and as far as advertisers go, our City isn’t small peanuts! We spend enough money each year with these guys to build a pretty decent house for someone up in Iowa...or maybe even someone out in O’Fallon! I just wish they’d figure out that the Council is part of the City and maybe give us a fair shake once in a while. I’m not sure if other gargantuan advertisers would actually allow that though!
Did you read the story in one of the big papers (chances are you didn’t) that claimed that Mr. Banas (St. Charles County Prosecuting Attorney) said that Brown should be on the ballot come April since the City Clerk certified the recall petitions? If the papers had bothered to print both sides of the story, they would have had to include that Mr. Banas also asserted that neither Brown nor Greer should have been placed on the ballot with so many serious questions at hand and the petitions should not have been certified. First, the apparent conflicts should have been investigated instead of rushing to certify them. If you watched the meetings many months back, you will remember several Council members making this very argument! We asked in vain, “If neither the County Clerk (now the ELECTION AUTHORITY) nor the city clerk have any obligation to oversee questions of election fraud, then who does?”
We all know the importance of a watchdog press and when government fails to do its duty, it’s the role of the press to call them on it. If you were standing in one of the Lee Enterprise publications you would probably hear the chirping of crickets right about now. In a little office on Main Street a tiny staff at First Capitol News has picked up the banner and become the watchdog press that Saint Charles had been without for many, many years before FCN came onto the scene!
Just remember, when the fully expected litany of editorials come our way in a few months from our friends at Lee, don’t blame them - they are just printing what they have to in order to keep favor with the folks paying their bills!
