Thoughts on the Scranton Times-Tribune newspaper.

Oh yes I have thoughts.

Oct 17, 2024

I saw a reddit post in r/Scranton asking Times-Tribune subscribers about their thoughts on the newspaper since the transfer of ownership in September 2023, when it was, as reported by The Wood Word, the news site of Marywood University: “sold by Times-Shamrock Communications to national publishing company MediaNews Group, a subsidiary of a hedge fund.” I started composing a reply in the reddit thread, and accidentally clicked on a link and my composed reply disappeared, so I just decided to start all over and just write a blog post about it.

I think some of the choices the Times-Tribune has made in publishing some things have been questionable and potentially dangerous for our community.

On January 6th 2024, the Times-Tribune published a Letter to the Editor that included naming “progressives” as “enemies of Jesus” in a political-religious way that I felt was dangerous speech, and could be viewed as inciting violence. It was a choice to publish that, since I’ve had several of my own LTEs rejected, and I live in Scranton. The sedevacantist letter was from someone near Hazleton, and it would’ve made more sense had they written to one of the two Wilkes-Barre newspapers. The letter author quoted Carlo Maria Viganò - the archbishop who was excommunicated by the Pope of the Roman Catholic Church a few months later. I think people are perfectly within their rights to have and express publicly their thoughts of sedevacantism or to criticize the Pope. The issue I had with it was that it linked this criticism more broadly to a specific political group (and clergy) as a “declared enemy” - specifically stating that “progressive ideology” means that certain people aren’t “real Catholics” (including clergy), and are in fact “declared enemies of Jesus and his faithful”. The headline may have been by the letter author but most headlines for my LTEs were written by the opinion page editor, and the headline for this LTE was: “Pope and progressives subvert Catholic traditions.” Calling people “subversives” has been used historically in the U.S. in McCarthyism, to name enemies to blacklist or persecute, and McCarthyism is a direct precursor to Trumpism, Rachel Maddow’s podcast Ultra maps that out in very well researched detail. This is quite clearly the type of language known to incite stochastic violence by people who believe themselves to be vigilantes. (Perpetrators of atrocities often claim justifications, the Terribly and Terrifyingly Normal podcast mentions this lots.) And members of some right-wing and militia groups have been very vocal about their extremist political plans and about their plans for state sponsored violence against political enemies. Political groups are not a protected class in the Genocide Convention, though it was originally slated to be included because it’s well known that political groups are targeted for war crimes and atrocities, but the reason that political groups were excluded as a class in the Genocide Convetion was because the Soviet Union dissented on including political groups, probably because the Soviet Union was, at that time, persecuting certain political groups. Though the letter to the editor was published online on January 3rd, let me repeat that it appeared in the JANUARY 6TH print issue of the newspaper. The choice of publishing it that day alone seemed questionable and sensationalistic to me, and particularly lacking good judgment.

The Times-Tribune actually ran a front page story about a case in an entirely different state speculating that maybe shooting into a crowd will be found legal. It seemed reckless and inappropriate on the front page of a Scranton Pennsylvania newspaper to be promoting the idea that gunfire into a crowd might be ok. I wrote a letter to the editor in response and submitted it, but it was not published in the newspaper, but so I published it myself in March 2024.

In February 2024, the Times-Tribune published a letter to the editor that was blatantly fluoride conspiracy theory fear mongering and likely an advertisement. Note that Scranton tap water, as far as I know has never had fluoride in it, and I don’t think any water in northeastern Pennsylvania has fluoride in it, so that’s not an issue here, and was not the subject of the LTE. And quite honestly it looked like the letter to the editor was simply an ad for fluoride-free toothpaste, since they mention it specifically at the end of the letter. It seemed to be probably part of a marketing PR tactic… a promotional campaign, the kind they do where they have people publish innocent looking fake testimonials for products, ask some moderators on Reddit or any forum, they will be familiar with testimonials that cleverly skirt the rules to promote products, especially “alternative” (pseudoscience) health products, many which aren’t even approved and are breaking various safety regulations. There’s been so much public complaint about this problem of sneakily placed marketing like this that the FTC is reportedly going to start regulating fake testimonials. I wonder if they would’ve even published it if it mentioned a brand name. It’s embarrassing that an editor at a newspaper didn't pick up on this probability and just published it, and without any editor’s note to fact check the asserted claims and innuendo out of context. This prompted the president of a local dental association to write a rebuttal, which was published but that was 10 days later, which was the right thing to do, but frankly too little too late.

They published an article in January 2024 ostensibly warning people about the continuing threat of the pandemic virus, however, curiously they did not consult or interview any medical experts for this article. They did not quote any doctors, public health officials, epidemiologists, or even any public health experts at all. Who did they interview? The quotes were from the business school graduate CEO of a local clinic, with no medical or science background listed on their Linkedin or mentioned in the article. The article also quoted the MBA who is head of marketing at the same local hospital that was scandalized in The Washington Post in 2020 for having nurses expose vulnerable babies in the NICU after shifts in the covid ward. This MBA also had no sign of any scientific or medical expertise in their Linkedin. The quotes were largely making unscientific speculations and off-hand unclear claims about how they guess maybe officials are handling SARS-CoV-2 nowadays and about how their clinical business operations are handling the covid threat, which sounded inadequate frankly. I think those unsubstantiated medical opinions by non-expert business spokespeople being published in an article about a public health threat was entirely reckless. I wrote a very measured response Letter to the Editor about this, which I provided and included 13 citations with evidence from actual medical and official sources, but it was rejected.

Another LTE I sent that was not chosen to be published by the Times-Tribune was in response to an October 2023 article that stated community theater operators “still feel the financial impact of COVID-19 in what most would consider a post-pandemic world” but then the article clearly depicts a situation that’s an ongoing pandemic. I have noticed that pandemic related LTEs don’t seem to very often be published, but that seems to be the case at various news outlets from what I’ve heard from others trying to submit them elsewhere, and the many I’ve submitted myself to various outlets by myself, and co-authored with other people. There was one LTE published in the Times-Tribune with someone who wrote in apparently to practically beg not to be harassed for masking by claiming her mask was “not a covid-19 issue”, which is probably the only reason it got published. I found it offensive, because covid-19 is definitely a very serious issue, among other things, if you’ve got any kind of immune deficiency. I recently submitted a LTE about mask bans, and have not heard back, so I’ll be publishing that if I don’t hear from the newspaper in 2 weeks from the date I submitted. Of course they had no problem printing support of the Great Barrington Declaration, lockdown revisionist lies about pandemic measures.

I did have a Letter to the Editor published in the Times-Tribune in November 2023, and it was in response to a most bizarre op-ed that was published suggesting that children should not evacuate if there’s a bomb reported in a school apparently because it inconveniences parents at work. The Times-Tribune was seemingly the first to publish this curiously bizarre and scary op-ed, and then it was picked up and published by other local newspapers. It seemed to be part of the general anti-remote PR propaganda spread by covid contrarians, lockdown revisionists, and people who seem to be interested in defending the interests of fossil fuel and commercial real estate.

And then there was the light pollution debacle in downtown Scranton. I felt the Times-Tribune was too much representing the conflict as a sort of local palace intrigue story, with an elected official and a local real estate mogul as the primary players in the story, rather than the citizens of the neighborhood affected and the general interests of ordinary people. It seemed somewhat elitist and just vibed as access journalism with both sidesing of the drama. I wrote about this myself because I’ve long been a dark sky and public health advocate, and obviously I’m not on the side of the reportedly maga mogul who basically felt the rules didn’t apply to him, and wasn’t bashful about stating that. I suppose it’s something that the newspaper just quoted him that way so we could see him for what he is, but then they depicted the mayor as more interested in representing business rather than broadly the ordinary citizens of our city, as if that’s just the natural order of things. All the coverage on that story felt off, and slanted toward marginalizing the tenant interests and health, maybe to just sensationalize the debacle. But I’m so tired of embattled business people as victims and the city and its mayor depicted as at the feet begging business. There’s been so much focus on trying to “revitalize the downtown” in Scranton for decades, and it always seems to be business oriented, when many of us have stood around scratching our heads trying to figure out why the people in charge never seem to realize that the way to revitalize the downtown is to MAKE IT LIVABLE. But instead, they worry about how to make it business-friendly, and wonder why they have to resort to having Democratic politicians push for civil servants to get butts in seats downtown for The Economy as a false god, in hopes they’ll shop there or go to restaurants because they have to be there to work. So instead of listening to tenants who want to LIVE downtown but can’t even sleep, they listen to businesses who want to make it unlivable, and then wonder why no businesses really last downtown for very long, especially in that theatre. It’s so obvious, unless you’re only concerned about pleasing short-term business interests, which is so unwaveringly the case, decade after decade. And the business orientation of the media sure doesn’t help.

I’ve mentioned before that it’s good that we even have local news reporting at all, but so often they publish things that are neither true nor socially responsible.

Are they really planning an anti-vax military retiree interahamwe in America? Chloe Humbert May 28, 2024
I seek out a range of media, because it takes work to navigate through the PR bullshit, paid promotions, and now sadly also AI slop. Censorship and preachy debunking isn’t the answer because it typically backfires — but it’s pretty obvious that the media has been constantly making dangerous decisions, and is responding to problematic funding incentives. My local newspaper in Scranton publishes weird rad trad cath letters to the editor, and even dangerous pseudoscience about fluoride and promotion of the Great Barrington Declaration, but often won’t publish much about real problems of the pandemic. But they also publish about things I want to know that are going on locally that require civic engagement. Some of the media just repeat GOP and Trump misconstrued fantasies as if they’re factual. And of course propaganda and disinformation is deliberately free, whereas real information is often hidden behind paywalls and inaccessible to most people of ordinary means.