The Bully Pulpit

In case you weren't aware, the Times-Standard over the past several weeks has been fighting a legal battle for your right to know.

Remember the Grand Jury that voted to indict former Eureka Police Chief Dave Douglas and Lt. Tony Zanotti? Those proceedings generated transcripts, and officials within the court system here in Humboldt County were doing their darndest to keep those documents under wraps.

But the old T-S wouldn't stand by for the fleecing of the masses. Under the direction of Kimberly Wear, city editor, as well as senior reporter John Driscoll and staff writer Thad Greenson, the T-S and its lawyers conducted a low-profile legal battle that ended Tuesday with the transcripts being released.

Enter the Eureka Reporter.

They conducted no battle for the transcripts or for your need to know what went on behind the Grand Jury's veil of secrecy. But conveniently they still managed, somehow, to get a hold of the documents roughly at the same time we did. Fine. As they say in the newspaper war, that's fair game.

But then they write a story quoting from the legal arguments used against us, and seem to go to great pains never to mention our attorneys, and who hired them, presumably because it would credit us with doing something they failed to do.

The ER was in the courtroom, heard the arguments from our side and the opposition, and somehow managed to write a story that completely omitted our involvement.

Then old GF Simmons, editor and chief of the five-day paper, lambasted one of our reporters by e-mail, criticizing his journalism skills, and said it was all an oversight. Wow ... that's some oversight. How do you forget to name the case from which you're quoting? How do you forget to name the parties involved? And you are criticizing our reporters?

That's pure comedy.

Such criticism is in fact the highest praise. We here in the Times-Standard's newsroom — the heart of the North Coast only DAILY newspaper — should thank you and yours for clinging to the sinking ship that is the Eureka Reporter.

It is next to you and your newspaper than we shine brightest by comparison.

Update: The string of vitriolic e-mails continue ... GFS now says the omission of our involvement is no worse than the T-S not covering the Economic Fuel contest sponsored by the Eureka Reporter, or the T-S willfully covering up events at the Arkley Center. Ouch, Glenn, you got us. Right through the heart.