THE LOCAL AREA WATCH

G.R. PRESS SPIKES MEMORIAL OBIT

Phyllis Jennings of Families United for Justice is no friend of Spectrum Health Corporation after her father died under suspicious circumstances in one of the facilities managed by the local health care behemoth.  As regular readers will recall, the Kent County medical examiner, who just happens to run a business on the side with Spectrum as his biggest customer, fumbled the autopsy of Jennings’s father to declare he could find no fault with Spectrum.  They will also recall how Spectrum has actively worked to squelch the coverage of this story in the mainstream media.

Even so, the scandal of a medical examiner in the pay of an organization he is responsible for investigating has gotten enough attention that some members of the Kent County Board of Commissioners are seriously considering the need for a full-time public official to run the medical examiner’s office instead of a moonlighter.  So, even if Jennings may never get justice for her father, her fight (along with that of the Sallie family) may soon bring about for us a long overdue restructuring of the medical examiner’s office.  For this we all owe her a debt of gratitude.

However, the Grand Rapids Press appears to disagree.  Jennings asked the Press to run a memorial obituary for her father on the second anniversary of his death at Spectrum-run Kent County Community Hospital.  The Press refused unless Jennings deleted from the memorial her family’s promise to her late father to “never give up our fight for the truth and for justice”.  There is, of course, nothing indecent, improper, or even controversial about such a statement to a departed loved one, but it looks like publisher Danny Gaydou’s Press insists upon sticking it to the Jennings family any way it can.  The fact that Gaydou is also chairman of Spectrum Health is no doubt merely a coincidence.

STRANGE TALES ON ELECTION EVE

I suppose it's part and parcel of the campaign season.  Here are some of the odder things the media has decided to report as Election Day draws near.

Bush orders the lowering of gasoline prices to boost confidence in the Republicans before the election.  No doubt, if one man has the power to dictate the price of gasoline, that's a blockbuster of a story.  And if that man is the president of the United States who has been sticking it to consumers with sky-high gasoline prices to enrich his backers in the oil industry and then cuts them ahead of an election to favor his party, that's nothing short of scandalous.  Of course, the real scandal is the media reporting this nonsense circulating among Democrats as anything but a loony conspiracy theory.  The reason gasoline prices have fallen in the two months ahead of the election is the same reason they usually fall in September and October every year.  The summer driving season is over, demand has dropped, and so prices have gone down.

A yellow dog Democrat denounces Dick DeVos for lying about a high school memory.  Apparently to bolster his credentials as a leader in his race for governor, Dick Jr. reminisced on his website that his high school football coach picked him to start as quarterback in a game back in '71 and gave him a pep talk lauding young Dick's leadership skills.  His old coach then went public to say it was all a lie.  OK, maybe there's a story in that, except ... Who really cares about a pep talk ahead of a forgotten football game thirty-five years ago?  Plus the fact that the coach is now a Democratic party activist who might have had a political motivation to not remember starting Dick and giving him a pep talk.  So one wonders why the media bothered to report the dust-up at all.  Maybe as an excuse to later report that Dick's coach admitting that he did start him as quarterback and probably did give him a pep tallk?  In short, there was no story in the first place.

A prominent supporter of Michigan's Proposal Two consorts with racists.  At least twice now the Grand Rapids Press has run dubious stories about Ward Connerly's alleged ties to white supremacist groups in his campaign for passage of Proposal Two, the ballot initiative to end racial and gender preferences in public jobs, college admissions, and contracting.  Connerly is the founder of a national movement to enact "color-blind" laws in each of the states, and the Press has taken the fact that some bigots use Connerly's campaign as cover for their own despicable agenda to insinuate that Connerly and his movement endorse the bigots.  Meanwhile, the Press has failed to report on the bullying tactics of the anti-Prop Two group "By Any Means Necessary" to stop Michiganders from even getting an opportunity to vote for or against Connerly's proposal and then, failing at that, to silence debate on it.

As it happens these strange tales I have pointed out largely come from left side of the political spectrum to tar the agenda and the candidates of the right.  There are strange tales that work in the opposite direction too.  So this isn't so much a left-right issue as the failure of the media to pass critical judgments as to what facts, and the conclusions drawn from them, merit the public's attention in the run-up to an election.  I suspect the mainstream media's turn away from a hard news ethic to infotainment, as exemplified by the "happy fun news" front page typical of the Grand Rapids Press these days, has a lot to do with the loss of this essential faculty to keep foolishness out of the news.

PUFF PIECES AND LONG KNIVES

This morning the Detroit Free Press, no friend of the right, ran a puff piece on Dick DeVos, the Republican candidate for governor.  The article waxed what a regular guy Dick is, despite his status as a scion of the Amway empire.  The article also promoted his competency as it detailed his career.  Well, maybe "detailed" isn't the right word, because the Free Press was a little skimpy on some of the facts.

For instance, the article mentioned that DeVos was vice president of Amway's international subsidiary from 1984 to 1989.  What it didn't mention was what happened during DeVos's watch -- namely, the Canadian tax scam that threatened to put his father, Amway founder Rich DeVos and partner Jay Van Andel, in the federal slammer.  In the end, it was determined that Amway was not scamming the Canadians on taxes, but instead was inflating profits it reported to lenders.  (Not incidentally, those inflated profits also served as proxies for the valuations of Amway-Asia and Amway-Pacific when the elder DeVos and Van Andel took those companies public on the Tokyo stock exchange, that later went bust when the truth was learned.)  Like a lot of top managers involved with this fiasco, Dick exited Amway.

Moreover, the prosecutor on the Canadian tax fraud case was then-U.S. Attorney John Smietanka, whose run in 1998 as the Republican candidate for Michigan attorney general against Jennifer Granholm the DeVoses sabotaged.  In fact, Dick's wife Betsy wielded the longest of the long knives against Smietanka.  Of course, Granholm's victory against Smietanka was her stepping to the governor's office.  So, in an odd way, Dick and his family are responsible for both sides of this year's match-up in the governor's race.

Oh well.  Who actually needs news in the newspaper, right?

G.R. PRESS RUNS ANTI-PROPOSAL TWO PROPAGANDA AS NEWS

Last week the Grand Rapids Press ran an editorial opposing Proposal 2, the November referendum to end race- and sex-based preferences in college admissions, state jobs, and government contracts.  Yesterday it ran a story announcing that a white supremacist group, the Michigan chapter of the Council of Conservative Citizens, supports Proposal 2.  Below the headline "Photo shows Proposal 2's extremist ties, say critics", the Press displayed a photograph of the CCC's chairman, John Raterink, shaking the hand of Ward Connerly, the leader of a state-by-state anti-racial preference campaign that put Proposal 2 on the ballot.

Whatever ones thinks of Proposal 2, the article is a cheap shot against it and the founder of the movement behind it that hardly amounts to news.  The basis for the story is nothing more than the waving of the bloody shirt by a local opponent of Proposal 2 who found the photograph of Raterink and Connerly on the CCC's website.  As it turns out, Connerly was shaking hands of supporters of Proposal 2 at a public event, one of whom was Raterink who asked to have his picture taken with Connerly.  Connerly states that he didn't know who Raterink was or his association with the CCC at the time the photograph was taken.  Anyone familiar with politics knows these sort of embarrassing photos pop up all the time, because politicians shake hands with everyone.

It hardly amounts to "extremist ties", as the Press declared, between the campaign to pass Proposal 2 and some pathetic bigots who happen to support it.  Moreover, absent from the Press has been coverage of the radical group "By Any Means Necessary" that has used racial intimidation, state agencies, and the courts to try to deny Michiganders even the opportunity to vote for or against Proposal 2.  Having failed to stop Proposal 2 from getting on the ballot, the group has resorted to hooliganism at debates on the measure to silence its proponents.

That's actually news.  It's serious when a group like "By Any Means Necessary" employs brown-shirt tactics to derail an election.  As loathsome as Raterink and his crew of racists are, at least none of them are trying to monkey-wrench the democratic process.  Yet, there's no similar story in the Press about how opponents to Proposal 2 have "extremist ties".  It appears that the Press is not able to contain its opposition to Proposal 2 to the editorial page and has let it spill into the news section by acts of both commission and omission. 

NON-NEWS NEWS

I find it interesting how a group can dump into the news media its propoganda in the form of a scientific-sounding "study" or "paper", which the media then uncritically regurgitates to the public as fact.  That happened yesterday on the front page of the Grand Rapids Press.

Under the headline "Report puts violent deaths in Iraq at 600,000", the Press recycled a short article from the Los Angeles Times that a "team of researchers" published an estimate that 601,027 Iraqis have died violent deaths since the U.S. invasion of Iraq in March 2003.  Setting aside how the number 601,027 seems rather precise for an estimate, the article makes no mention of the methodology of these researchers.  Nor does it state the estimates of this figure from other sources.  Moreover, the article does not report the relationship of the researchers with anti-war organizations.

Finally, there is no attempt in the article to make this estimate comprehensible to the reader.  For example, 601,027 violent deaths since March 2003 means 470 Iraqis have been killed EVERY single day.  That is not a level of carnage that news media, even as lazy and sloppy as I think most in the business are, would have missed.  Yet the Press passes along the figure as front-page news because some professor says it's so.  This is not news and does not belong in the newspaper.

REVISITED: SPECTRUM BULLIES TV STATION TO PULL NEWS STORY

EDITOR'S NOTE:  This week we will publish an article on the failure to the Kent County Board of Commissioners to act upon Dr. Cohle's conflict of interest between his public duties as Chief Medical Examiner of Kent County and his private business relationship with Spectrum Health Corporation.  To fully understand the breach of public trust that has occurred, we thought it would be helpful to our readers to re-publish the previous articles on this issue. This is the second article in the series.

You may recall the story we posted at the beginning of the year about the mysterious fates of Phyllis Jennings's father and Kristi Sallie's mother at Spectrum Health facilities.  Despite plain evidence to the contrary, such as unusual wounds and bruises on the body of the father Edwin Jennings, Spectrum's in-house pathologists declared that in neither case was there anything suspect in their deaths.  (We then also learned of a third unusual death fitting the same profile that was whitewashed by Spectrum officials.)  The Kent County Medical Examiner Stephen Cohle poohed-poohed the complaints of the Jennings and Sallie families and closed the matter with a report, that a professional if not a layman would immediately recognize as scandalously vague and incomplete.

Come to find out, Cohle was highly unlikely to ever critically examine the work of Spectrum's pathologists, because they are contractors provided to Spectrum Health by Laboratory Pathologists P.C., a medical services firm he owns!  In other words, despite the duties of his public office Cohle was not about to bite the hand that feeds him.  Meanwhile, taxpayers are paying good money to have the fox watch the henhouse, and the Kent County Board of Commissioners has been despicable in its refusal to take effective action to rid the public of this gross conflict of interest.  And justice continues to be denied the Jennings and Sallie families.

On top of all this, the Jennings family was shocked to discover that Spectrum Health removed Edwin's brain and arranged to have it delivered to the Transplantation Society.  However, Edwin was not an organ donor.  Moreover, neither Cohle's pathologists working for Spectrum nor Cohle as the medical examiner mentioned in their official reports that Edwin's brain had been removed from his body.  The Jennings only learned of this horror when they had Edwin's body exhumed four months after his burial for an independent, professional autopsy.  Afterwards, Spectrum Health without explanation returned Edwin's brain in a vat of formaldehyde.

As it happens there is a booming market in the U.S. for human body parts and tissues.  Unscrupulous funeral homes, hospitals, and medical labs remove pricey parts of the deceased, who are then soon buried, which pretty much eliminates the evidence of the crime.  Once again, your medical examiner Stephen Cohle has no interest in pursuing this matter.  In light of the direct conflict of interest with his company, Laboratory Pathologists, which was involved in the disappearance of Edwin's brain -- his inaction is unacceptable.

Although the local media has not done a good job of covering this important story, Detroit's ABC affiliate WXYZ TV7 did.  After recently airing the story of Edwin's stolen brain on the evening newscast, reporter Ray Sayah posted the story on WXYZ's website on May 7, 2006.  According to Sayah, Spectrum Health then leaned on WXYZ to delete the story and the station capitulated.  You now can no longer find the story about Edwin Jennings on its website.  WXYZ is an aggressive news organization, so it makes one wonder what kind of threat Spectrum could have made that intimidated the station.  Whatever it was, it worked.

So, remember, folks.  Spectrum Health protects itself, not the health of you and your loved ones.  For Stephen Cohle, the Kent County medical examiner, taking care of his private business affairs trumps his public duty to you.  Your elected officials, in particular the Kent County Board of Commissioners, simply don't give a damn about that conflict of interest.  And the media in Michigan, if not already in the bag for Spectrum (like Grand Rapids Press publisher Danny Gaydou) have feet of clay when comes to the big hospital on the hill.  Therefore, never forget you're on your own.

[Originally published on May 24, 2006.]

MSM CATCHES UP WITH L.A.W.

Our readers send us many interesting things.  The other day, in response to our recent criticism of the Grand Rapids Press's uncritical reporting about the National Academy of Sciences report on "global warming", one reader faxed us a clip from the Wall Street Journal titled "Hockey Stick Hockum".  (Log-in required to access link.)  The commentary confirmed what we had to say in our article and our ensuing responses to readers (here and here) about the mendacity behind global warming.

Of particular interest in the Journal's commentary was the Wegman Report commissioned by the House Energy Committee.  (Note how the Press splashed a big story on Page Three about the NAS report commissioned by the House Science Committee that fanned the flames of global warming hysteria but had nothing to print about Wegman Report that critically reviewed the scientists and their claims in support of catatrosphic climate change.  Bias or incompetence?  Your pick.)  In addition to dismantling the severely flawed statistical methodologies used to fashion out of nothing an unprecedented and alarming increase in temperature over the past century (i.e., climatologist Michael Mann's notorious "hockey stick" graph that has now become the holy grail for global warming Cassandras), the Wegman Report also analyzes the behavior of the scientists involved in climate research.

As I noted in a response to a reader, the ordinary layman need not and should not simply accept the statements of a scientist as authoritative because he has a PhD after his name.  That scientist is also a human being subject to the same perversities that all of us are which can impair a dispassionate judgment of the facts.  Indeed, the Wegman Report finds that the climate research establishment is "a tightly knit group of individuals who passionately believe in their thesis [i.e., catastrophic global warming]" and that "this group has a self-reinforcing feedback mechanism and, moreover, the work has been sufficiently politicized that they can hardly reassess their public positions without losing credibility".  In short, among too many climatologists, ego has trumphed professional integrity.

Well, it's always heartening when the mainstream media catches up with us.  Can we hope that the Press will do so, too?  After all, it matters to you when a group has the ear of much of the government and is demanding that you pay more taxes and give more power to the bureaucrats to address what they say is a looming crisis.  It's the job of the media to give you all the information you need to figure out if that crisis is real or just another boondoggle targeted at your wallet and your liberty.  When it uncritically reports only half the story, like the Grand Rapids Press has regarding global warming, it has failed in its responsibility to the public.

YEAH, AND SUMMER IS HOTTER THAN WINTER

On Thursday last week the Grand Rapids dutifully toted the official line on global warming.  In a Page 3 article the Press reported the conclusion of the National Academy of Sciences that recent years have been the warmest in the last four centuries.  Nowhere is reported the well-known fact that four hundred years ago our planet was in the grip of a cold spell known as "The Little Ice Age".  Indeed, this is no esoteric climatological matter.  The Little Ice Age has been fodder for a number of popular television documentaries including a two-hour special within the past year on the History Channel.

So, the conclusion of the NAS is no more news than the fact that June's temperatures have been the hottest in the past six months.  After all, summer is always hotter than winter.  Likewise, the Earth has been warming and cooling since the last ice age ten millennia ago in a six- to seven-century cycle.  Following that pattern temperatures last peaked during the early 14th century, sometimes referred to as the Medieval Climate Optimum, then bottomed out three centuries later in the Little Ice Age, and have been rising since then.  We may well be at the peak of the current warm spell, if you can call an average increase in temperature of less than one degree Celsius over the past hundred years a warm spell.

In fact, the real news is the scandal of the NAS flogging this crap as a significant scientific finding.  The NAS was chartered by the U.S. Congress to advise government officials on scientific matters, which in effect means that it exists to tell politicians what they want to hear.  So no surprise that the NAS presented no news as new news of global warming at the request of a New York congressman, Rep. Sherwood Boehlert, chairman of the House Science Committee, who rails against global warming as a major threat to us.  Does anyone seriously think that the NAS is going to bite the hand that feeds it?

No, but what is stopping the Grand Rapids Press from informing the public of this conflict of interest?  After all, the Press saw fit on the next day to expose in another Page 3 article the secret wartime measures our government has taken to monitor and track down the financial transactions of terrorist organizations.  What sort of watchdog makes it a priority to compromise the safety of the public over a cozy arrangement to distort science and squander taxpayer dollars?  If the media can't get something that simple right, what good is it?

ONLY HALF THE STORY

Is it really too much to ask of the Grand Rapids Press to tell the full story?  Last week, the local rag headlined the regional section with "By choice, GR schools a bigger draw".  Reporter Dave Murray then opens the story with this:

"Grand Rapids slowly is becoming a destination district for students using the county's school choice plan.  Educators say 84 suburban students are entering the city schools through the plan, up 23 from last year and by far the most ever accepted by the district."

Murray's "by far" is an indication of just how pathetic Grand Rapids public schools are in drawing new students from the 'burbs.  But you wouldn't know this because he makes no mention whatsoever in his lengthy article that the GRPS will probably lose another 800 or more students to suburban districts come September.  So now you have the other half of the story.

STILL MILKING IT

Believe it or not, more than two weeks later the Grand Rapids Press is still milking whatever it can out of this sad story.  If anyone can show me the news value of the Page 3 article published in the Saturday edition of the Press, I'll buy Mike Lloyd lunch.