-By Warner Todd Huston
The small New York newspaper that made a big splash by publicizing the names and addresses of thousands of New York’s legal gun owners is now refusing to give comments to other news agencies and has hired a big time, expensive public relations firm from Manhattan as its public face.
Eric Wemple of the Washington Post recently found the curious situation when he contacted the Journal News to get some information but was told that he would now get his ubiquitous “no comment” from one Edmund Tagliaferri.
Wemple goes on to explain that Tagliaferri is an executive vice president at DKC, a Manhattan public relations, marketing and government affairs firm.
Wemple wonders why a newspaper headed Gannet, by one of the biggest newspaper chains in the country, needs a highfalutin, New York City-based PR firm to answer questions about its journalism. It is a good question, indeed.
Hiring a big-time PR firm sure makes the Journal News look like it can’t take the heat it has brought upon itself.
The paper may have quite a lot to spin itself out of, too. After at least one house burglary has been tied to the paper’s gun map stunt. After the Journal News published the address of a home that had guns inside, the home appears to have been targeted by thieves looking to steal guns. It also seems pretty clear that the homeowners have a solid case against the newspaper for liability.
Lastly, Project Veritas took on this general subject with its latest video sting, asking journalists if they’d post a sign in their yards proclaiming the premises to be “proudly gun-free.” The investigative videographers even went to the homes of some Journal News writers to see if, in keeping with their hatred for the Second Amendment, they’d post the sign in their own yards. Curiously, every journalist in the video felt that posting such a sign was an invitation to home invaders. Imagine that!!
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“The only end of writing is to enable the reader better to enjoy life, or better to endure it.”
–Samuel Johnson
Warner Todd Huston is a Chicago based freelance writer. He has been writing opinion editorials and social criticism since early 2001 and before that he wrote articles on U.S. history for several small American magazines. His political columns are featured on many websites such as Andrew Breitbart’s BigGovernment.com, BigHollywood.com, and BigJournalism.com, as well as RightWingNews.com, RightPundits.com, CanadaFreePress.com, StoptheACLU.com, AmericanDaily.com, among many, many others. Mr. Huston is also endlessly amused that one of his articles formed the basis of an article in Germany’s Der Spiegel Magazine in 2008.
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