Why did the New Bedford Standard-Times make a fool of itself last month by lashing out at Massachusetts News so aggressively about Acushnet?

And why did it hide the fact that its terrible reporting in October 1998 was what caused us to start Massachusetts News in the first place?

The Times was praised by the school superintendent of Acushnet, Harold Devine, as a great resource for the community.

He piled three articles from the paper at the front of the meeting room on August 9 and he urged everyone to take them.

The only problem for Devine was that the principal of the middle school, John Tavares, had already decided to remove the topic of homosexuality from the unit on tolerance. But no one knew that except for Devine and he didn't reveal it until the questioning began.

In light of that, why did the newspaper and the Superintendent make fools of themselves by lashing out at us with ridiculous charges when they had already corrected the problem that was exposed at Fistgate?

Here's what the paper printed about us, using a quote from Devine. "[T]he newsletter is completely wrong and printing 'the truth as they would like it to be. They're anti-government, anti-school, and they have an agenda. They're true zealots....This is complete trash.'"

But when Devine appeared at the August 9 meeting, he was unable to reveal even one thing that was inaccurate in our paper except to say he did not like the use of "Gay Agenda" in the headline.

When 50 concerned parents showed up at the meeting last month, the Superintendent was startled by the response, all of which was critical of him. So the Times never reported anything about that meeting on its website. We must assume that they don't print any news they don't like.

Columnist Was Really Nasty
But the really dirty stuff was done by a columnist named Dick White who said, "What we have here is this state's first, dyed-in-the-wool, ultra-Right Wing, incredibly homophobic, intolerant, hate-mongering rag in the guise of a newspaper."

Wow!

But that's only the beginning of an intelligent discussion in the Times.
White claimed that none of what we printed was true because the "superintendent has refuted the paper's claims." This is what they call investigative reporting in New Bedford. They call the superintendent of schools and ask, "Do you have any problems down there?" and they report his answer as "fact." No wonder Devine believes this paper is a great resource.

The columnist then savaged us because we told about the Boston Globe advising mothers to teach their young children about the "mechanics" of homosexual sex. The only problem is that White never read the Globe story or he wouldn't have made a fool of himself.  But you can read it. It was a feature story in the July 6 "At Home" section under "Child Caring."  

And that's only the beginning. But you can see it yourself if you're interested. Dr. Devine has plenty of free copies. He thinks it's great.

Standard-Times Has Bad History
Although the reporter for the Times wrote in his first article that parents "wanted to know more about the Massachusetts News," he failed to tell them any of our history. I had told him that our newspaper was started solely because of terrible stories they had written in the Times. When I talked to the reporter, Aaron Nicodemus, the day before his story about Acushnet appeared in the Times, he said he was "new." He didn't have much time because he had to write the story for the next day's paper. He did not have a copy of our paper and was depending upon printouts from our Internet site. I expressed surprise that he couldn't find a copy of our paper since we had mailed over 225,000 of them to the area.

This may explain why Nicodemus referred to us as a "newsletter" when we are a newspaper with a much higher distribution than his, although his is one of six daily papers in Massachusetts that are owned by The Wall Street Journal. (Our distribution probably exceeds the total of all six of their newspapers in Massachusetts.)

I had explained to Nicodemus that an article on October 20, 1998 in the Times had had a first paragraph which said, "There's no bigot like a Christian bigot. I think I may have read that some place, but if not, I will gladly take credit for it. When it comes to bigotry, Christians have the copyright."

The article blamed the Christian community for the death of the homosexual in Wyoming, Matthew Shepard, who was killed by psychopaths who then went back to the bar and tried to kill a heterosexual man the same night. The article went on and on with a diatribe against Christians. I wrote a polite letter to the publisher of the Times and then to the Wall Street Journal's conglomerate, Ottaway Newspapers in New York. I was sure the Times would print a correction, but, instead, they printed a worse article a few weeks later. It was apparent that someone had to answer those ridiculous charges and Massachusetts News was born. (The Times printed another such diatribe against Christians earlier this year.) A few Catholic priests wrote to the Times in protest, but no one else seemed to be bothered. (There was not a peep from the Anti Defamation League although when you read what they said about me in the latest article in the Times, it appears as though they have a thick dossier on me.)

Someone had to answer the Times and we did. It was the birth of Massachusetts News.