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Wednesday, May 29, 2013

If you don't know what a "Crony Capitalist" is you just might be an editorial writer.

 
Christina Nuckols has this in common with most of the people in the dead tree news industry: she hates Ken Cuccinelli with the heat of a thousand suns. So she chooses to tag him with the accusation that he’s a crony capitalist for accepting donations for companies that support his stand on their industry and the environment. Using that slur, which is pretty much all the editors of Virginia’s newspapers have left, the term loses its meaning. Is Obama a crony capitalist because he and his PACs accept money from business interests? No; Obama is a crony capitalist because he shovels tax money to companies who can’t make it on their own. In fact, like Solyndra and the scores of “solyndras” that have followed in its wake, they can’t even make money when they got huge loans and subsidies from the Federal treasury. Hardly a week passes without the announcement of another “green” company that got direct financial aid from the Obama administration going bust. Crony Capitalism is hard at work when pals and allies of the administration get money, loans, or special regulations that enrich the Crony Capitalists at the expense of the taxpayer.  Allowing companies to engage in business by removing crushing regulation is the very opposite of crony capitalism.  
 
Nuckols is the editorial page editor for the Roanoke Times, owned by the billionaire Batten family who have moved their Christina around the state from one property to another.

For people who are interested, here is a recording of Christina interviewing a member of a gun rights group who tells us that she misrepresented what he told her.   By the way, recording your conversations with reporters is always a good idea.  If they lie about what you said, as usually happens (they wrote the article before they interviewed you, they're just hunting for the right quote to support their story), you can then put the recording on the Internet.  Sending a letter to the editor does no good; it won't be printed. 
 
Glenn Reynolds calls people like Christina Nuckols Democrat partisans with bylines.  

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

And they still can't figure out why nobody buys their papers anymore.My question is,who are these newspapers really written for these days?I think they are staying alive on the graces of older readers who just buy the paper because they always have.We were,in the last decade,only buying the saturday paper for the TV listings.When they did away with that,we stopped.News is newer,and less one sided,online.We'll never go back,and the papers themselves are the reason.