How the Herald almost started the Watchdog

On June 14, 2011, blogger Rob Eichmann met with Herald editor Bruce Tomlinson to discuss taking the Herald website statewide.  Eichmann brought along Bill Winkler, who had arranged the meeting on his behalf, and Tomlinson brought in Herald Internet director Amy Paterson.  The meeting was held at the Herald's Newton offices.

Eichmann saw the need for a conservative-leaning print newspaper in New Jersey, to provide balance to the left-leaning Newhouse and Gannett newspaper groups , among others.  With the Herald print edition serving a conservative county, a right-of-center tilt wouldn't hurt it any, while assuming the mantle as the state's "conservative" newspaper would open up the possibility of the Herald operating a website with statewide reach.  To that end, Eichmann was willing to share a reader base of over 40,000 emails with the Herald.

Unfortunately, Tomlinson wasn't having any of it.  During the meeting, he lashed out at the idea of the Herald becoming "New Jersey's Fox News."  Eichmann took his idea away with him and had found funding for it when he was diagnosed with a particularly aggressive form of cancer.  He died in 2013, before his idea could be launched.  But not before launching a few websites of his own, including Sussex Watchdog.

Originally called Sussex County GOP Watchdog, Eichmann launched the blog in the spring of 2012 with the help of restaurant owner Gail Phoebus, a candidate for Sussex County Freeholder at the time.  After he died, it was relaunched as Sussex County Watchdog and adopted a less partisan, more reform-minded posture.  Many different people contribute to it, including Harvey Roseff, a sometime independent political candidate. 

Of course, the Herald's Tomlinson was furious when Eichmann went ahead anyway.  Tomlinson had assumed that his rejection meant an end to it and did not appreciate Eichmann's determination.  The Herald -- especially Tomlinson -- have had a hard on for the website and its contributors ever since.

Sometime after Tomlinson's arrival at the Herald, the newspaper began to adopt the role of political arbiter in Sussex County.  If politics were a scale with Republicans on one side and Democrats/Independents/Greens on the other, Tomlinson attempted to play the role of a kind of god, using the Herald to balance out the prospects of the opposing sides. This became preposterously obvious in 2011, when he suppressed coverage of the criminal conviction of an independent candidate who used violence against a mother and a child.  When the Herald refused to write about it -- but the candidate lost anyway -- Tomlinson blamed the professionalism of the Republican campaign.

Curiously, he was joined in this by a consultant-turned-politician on the make by the name of George Graham.  Graham was a journeyman political consultant from Hudson County -- where he mainly worked Democrat municipal campaigns and did the government relations work for a major county contractor.  He was also a local elected official in Sussex County who had flipped from Democrat to Republican back to Democrat and then back to Republican again.  Graham contributed to Democrat legislative candidates and even voted in the Democrat presidential primary in 2008 for Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton.

Graham wanted to take a piece of the political consulting action in Sussex County and he also wanted to advance up the ranks of elected office.  He took over the Sussex County League of Municipalities and held it until the finances ran out.  He made an important alliance with attorney Dan Perez, who had been introduced to Sussex County legal circles by the Herald's own attorney.  Perez is currently the Democrat Party candidate for Freeholder in Sussex County.

Graham worked in a kind of partnership with the Herald -- and boasted about the hundreds of times he had met with the editor and senior staff.  Graham opposed reform legislation to end the newspaper subsidy, which counted for a great deal with the Herald.  In return, the Herald has been uniformly supportive of Graham's political career.  Last year, the Herald suppressed coverage of the challenge to Graham in his bid to be re-elected Freeholder.  The contrast between 2016 and 2017 could not be greater.

Aside from Graham, the Herald has adopted an antagonistic view towards political professionals -- seeing them as a direct threat to their ability to "play god" and place a thumb on the scale as seen fit.  This is strange, because political professionals have been working in Sussex County -- and indeed everywhere else in America and the free world -- for at least 40 years.  The political consultant is a well established staple of American political life, not the dangerous novelty that bizarrely the Herald would have us believe.

The Herald is part of a mid-western based media empire and we know for a fact that each and every one of those media units within Quincy Media corporation, every radio or cable station and the Quincy Whig, they all have professional dealings with political consultants.  Throughout the whole of the Quincy empire they are viewed as clients -- but not by the Herald.

With malice and premeditation, the Herald has worked to draw out and "expose" political professionals for the purpose of making them boogey men -- all except George Graham.  The Herald has imposed rules on subscribers who pay to use its website in order to identify them with the equivalent of stars and triangles -- for the purposes of making them objects of hate.  No other newspaper in the state of New Jersey has similar rules.  None.  Most newspapers don't even ask that you be a subscriber to comment.  None monitor political professionals.  None care if you post anonymously.  Only the Herald, with its agenda, and a stick planted firmly up its arsehole.

Not content with "exposing" political professionals, the Herald has worked to "expose" their family members and to apply the same rules to them.  The Herald actually trolls social media in order to determine relationships between paid subscribers who comment and elected officials.  That is how mental it has become.  The Herald has become so obsessed that, in our opinion, it crosses the line into restraint of trade. 

The philosopher Michael Oakeshott reminds us that journalism is not about persuading others but rather it is about reporting events clearly.  The Herald is very far removed from this ideal.  In fact, Tomlinson and company more often behave like marketing reps than reporters -- laying their hands all over a story to spin it this way or that.  But in the interest of whom? 

In contrast to the Herald, we have an open policy.  Please feel free to send Watchdog leads or indeed full columns and we will post them.  Thank you.

Does Amy Paterson hate the First Amendment?

Some so-called journalists treat the First Amendment like it is a wank doll.  It is not a two-way relationship but rather there for their use alone.

Tom Moran of the Star-Ledger condemns "hate speech" except when he regularly indulges in it as a feature of his opinion columns.  Then it is good hate speech because it is his. 

Amy Paterson of the NJ Herald polices her website for "political" commentators -- removing the comments of adult children of people "involved" in politics (but who never ran for elected office), while leaving up comments from actual politicians who have run for office or who are actively running for office, lobbyists who have held elected office, and former office holders with active business before county government.  It takes pretty thick lenses not to see these characters as political but Amy Paterson must have hers implanted because she blithely continues to play favorites.  In Amy Paterson's warped little brain, a twenty-year old woman is still the "property" of her parents and is not yet emancipated to the point where she can hold an opinion or vote.

At some point, shouldn't Amy Paterson be made to file with NJELEC?  After all, by stripping all the opinions of one side from the Herald's website but leaving all those of the other, isn't she making an in-kind contribution to someone's political campaign?  She has even left up the comments of the notorious poster who went by the name of DudeRules.  We all remember when this flaming idiot tried to put a hex on the daughter and grandson of a local elected official.  The State Police investigated it as a death threat, but even that doesn't get you removed from the Herald, so long as you are careful to only say bad things about the people Amy disapproves of.  If Amy and you dislike the same people, you are free to get personal to the point of commenting on your victim's children and parenting skills and she will leave up those comments.  Sounds like something corporate could get sued for.  We wonder if they know?

Curiously, Amy Paterson of the Herald is the only internet director in the state who polices her website this way.  Apparently, everyone else recognizes that a conversation creates more readers, while a monologue enforced by Amy Paterson doesn't.  So it isn't even good business sense.

We are told that Amy feels she can make these assumptions about people and place her thumb on the scale to unbalance any on-line dialogue she chooses to interfere with because she thinks she is a good judge of people.  A real people person is our Ms. Paterson.  Now if only she could find it in her heart to respect the First Amendment to the Bill of Rights of the U.S. Constitution.

Oroho trying to prevent property tax explosion

To media insiders like Amy Paterson, New Jersey's transportation funding crisis is way too complicated to even try to have an educated debate about it.  It's a lot more complicated than those kitten videos newspaper internet directors use to attract viewership (as opposed to readership).  In fact, she so much doesn't want to have a debate, that she has actively censored attempts to make the TTF issue more understandable. 

To insiders like Amy, just as the kitten will miraculously get its head unstuck, the roads and bridges will miraculously get maintained and repaired regardless of whether or not there is money to pay for those repairs.

Of course, in the real world, we know that when the money runs out, and the workers don't get paid, the repairs will stop.  Here's how it works. 

The Transportation Trust Fund (TTF) collects money from the gas tax and then uses that money to maintain and repair state roads and bridges.  The TTF also sends money to local governments (counties and municipalities) so that they can afford to maintain and repair the roads and bridges that they own. 

The TTF is nearly bankrupt.  There will be no money for the maintenance and repair of the roads and bridges owned by the state AND there will be no money to send to local governments to maintain and repair their roads and bridges.

When that happens, local governments will have a decision to make:  Either they raise property taxes on every homeowner and business to pay for the maintenance and repair of roads and bridges; or they allow those roads and bridges to fall into disrepair, and become unsafe. 

If local governments take the second option and allow roads and bridges to become unsafe, they will be left with just two choices:  Close those roads and bridges as they become unsafe, or accept that there will be lawsuits for negligence when people are injured or killed on those unsafe roads and bridges.  Of course, the legal bills and settlements for such lawsuits will also result in the need to raise property taxes -- so the taxpayer will lose either way.

Approximately one-third of gas tax revenues in New Jersey come from out-of-state travelers.  All property taxes come from the people of New Jersey.  So which do you think is the best way to pay for improvements to roads and bridges, an increase in the gas tax or an increase in property taxes?

Let Watchdog know and we'll print your thoughts and suggestions.  We are not afraid of having an open debate.

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Now we have had a suggestion on how counties and municipal governments could save some money and then direct that money to road and bridge maintenance and repairs.  

Currently, every property taxpayer in New Jersey SUBSIDIZES newspapers.  Here's how it is done:  State law requires that advertisements be placed in newspapers for many official actions -- like notices of sheriff sales and local government budgets.  Millions of property tax dollars are spent each year by local governments for these advertisements and that money goes directly into the pockets of the corporate entities that own and control the newspapers.

But modern technology has made this expense antiquated and unnecessary.  Today, notice could be given on government-owned websites for a tiny fraction of the cost property taxpayers are paying now to newspapers.

And who benefits from this subsidy?  Mostly they are out-of-state corporations who have no stake in our communities.  Often they push the agenda of some anonymous corporate tycoon , while all we see is their corporate shills -- people like Amy Paterson. 

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No doubt there are other savings to be made, but can they be made in time?  The money in the TTF has already started running out.

Now here is something that "censor-in-chief" Amy Paterson doesn't want you to know.  Last month the town of Montville, in Morris County, went to the TTF for funding to repair a road.  It was turned down.  Many of the subsidized big corporate newspapers missed it , but a small Morris County newspaper did report on it and noted the shock of township leaders:

Due to the New Jersey Transportation Fund’s unfunded state, Canning said he saw something he had never seen in 25 years of working in government: a grant denial.

“There were 641 applications to the NJ Department of Transportation requesting more than $253 million of the $78.75 million available in municipal aide grant funds,” said Canning, “and they did not approve our Brittany Road project, therefore, all $650,000 will have to be self-funded.”

What that "will have to be self-funded" means is that the property taxpayers of Montville will be stuck paying for those repairs.  Now magnify that by all the roads and bridges that need repair in Sussex County, divide by the number of property taxpayers, and that will give you some idea of what is coming our way if leaders like Senator Steve Oroho don't get the support they need to fix the bankrupt TTF.