Censorship, and other problems, at The Buffalo News

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Delivery problems – and apparently the lack of a spine – continue to plague The Buffalo News.

Since the weather turned cold and snowy, home delivery has been hit and miss. I still subscribe and there’s probably been a half-dozen days since Christmastime where I haven’t received a paper. One time, it was a multiple-day stretch. Last week, technical troubles forced The News to shrink the size of its print edition. 

“A serious technical outage is creating production issues for all Lee newspapers,” Editor Margaret Kenny wrote in Thursday’s paper. “Our IT staff is working around the clock to fully restore operations, but in the interim, we have temporarily consolidated The Buffalo News into two sections.”

On Saturday, The News described the problem as a “cybersecurity event” and said they’ve contacted law enforcement.

Also on Saturday, Don Paul, the meteorologist who contributes to The News, posted to Twitter that the paper’s editors censored his most-recent column. He published on Twitter what The News refused to on its website, including:

It was announced a week ago that both the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the U.S. Department of Agriculture had been ordered by the administration to remove all material related to a warming climate. Despite the irrefutable evidence of such warming and what’s causing it (this from a yet-undisturbed NASA climate website: https://climate.nasa.gov/evidence.amp), there appears to be a broad-based program to scrub many federal websites’ climate science related to anthropogenic warming, the driving force behind rising sea levels, more droughts in arid regions, more stronger hurricanes, more flooding in wet areas, more wildfires…and the like.

Paul wrote that The News cited a policy prohibiting local columnists from writing about national political issues. Yeah, right.

A look at Paul’s Twitter feed shows a fair number of retweets critical of Donald Trump’s actions since resuming the presidency. Perhaps that contributed to the decision to censor his column.

Look, I get it. The News is losing customers left and right, a fair number of them Trumpers. There’s the temptation to placate them by tempering what it publishes. While the paper’s editorial page has vented about Trump a couple of times,  news coverage has been mixed. Then there was the publication of an editorial cartoon from another outlet that labeled former CNN reporter Jim Acosta a liar – a characterization right out of the Trump playbook.

Now is not the time for news outlets to split the difference.

Lou Ciminelli and Alain Kaloyeros are facing the prospect of being retried on corruption charges involving the construction of Tesla’s plant in South Buffalo. The U.S. Supreme Court overturned their convictions two years ago, but the case was sent back to a lower court which has ruled the defendants can be tried again. The U.S. Attorney’s office in Manhattan wants another crack at the case. Attorneys for the defendants say the lower court ruling amounts to double jeopardy and are expected to petition the Supreme Court seeking a review of the circuit court decision.

Acting Mayor Chris Scanlon said last week that Buffalo has the second-lowest property tax rate in the state. That helps to explain the city’s fiscal crisis.

I swear I don’t want to keep writing about the Trump/Musk presidency, but how can I ignore it? It’s sucking up most of the oxygen in the news world.

I’ve subscribed or otherwise follow the Trump tracking websites I recommended last month and I’ve got to say there’s a lot of good reporting being done. I’m particularly impressed by the work of The Bulwark, which New York Magazine reports is enjoying explosive growth.

I’ll highlight just of handful of stories I read during the past week:

• Trump ordered the release of 2.2 billion gallons of water from two California reservoirs in light of the devastating wildfires in and around Los Angeles. Good move, right? Wrong. “This release is extremely concerning,” one expert told the San Jose Mercury News. The water is not flowing to L.A. and is not presently needed, as Southern California is in the midst of its rainy season. What’s more, the water was being held in reserve for release during the summer dry season, when it’s likely to be needed.
• You’ve no doubt read about Trump’s desire to rid Gaza of Palestinians so it can be redeveloped into the “Riviera of the Mediterranean.” Where did such a crazy idea come from? His son-in-law, Jared Kushner, an investor and real estate developer, floated the idea a year ago, saying, among other things, that “Gaza’s waterfront property, it could be very valuable.” Apparently there’s money to be made in ethnic cleansing.
• Elon Musk continues to run amok, seizing sensitive financial data and assaulting  USAID, which provides critical aid to humanitarian programs across the world, including anti-hunger efforts. ProPublica has started documenting the members of Musk’s team, including a 19-year-old college dropout. Meanwhile, The New York Times did a deep dive on Musk’s assault on the federal government.

Add the NFL to the list of Trump toadies. It’s decided to swap out “End Racism” posted at the back of end zones for “Choose Love” for Sunday’s Super Bowl. (Well, at least the Chiefs lost.)

The owners of major leagues teams are rich. Here are the politicians they donate to.

The Pew Research Center has published all sorts of facts and figures about Black Americans. Lots of interesting insights.

Adam Zyglis has been drawing editorial cartoons for The Buffalo News for 20 years. He does great work and has won a Pulitzer Prize. He’s got a career retrospective at the Buffalo History Museum that I took in a week ago. Really interesting. There’s lots of cartoons, along with his comments. There’s also a collection of hate mail he’s received over the years. A lot of it. The exhibition runs through May. Highly recommended.

Jim Heaney