Now that there’s been a bit of a cooling off period, I may be able to better explain to your satisfaction the issues at play here.

Blanket statements like “there’s not a single editor or reporter in the free press who” … well, citation needed. “Find yourself a professional journalist …”

Hi.

I’m not holding against you the fact that you didn’t read the link in the sidebar that sets expectations for the community that were agreed upon with the admins before I was empowered to set the tone. It explains I was an editor at daily papers for 15 years, which is why I was trusted to make the sorts of calls you’re taking offense to here.

Assuming I’m blithely making the rules up as I go because you don’t like them reveals less about my qualifications than how personal this topic is to you. And I get it. Removing the story because it was not reported news does not mean I’m not alarmed that this is the direction the Ohio GOP has chosen to go in, but as a press release, it’s a tantrum, not policy. It’s also not exactly stop-press in terms of tactics. Nationally and regionally, the GOP’s stance has for years now been to tell voters that they’re wrong for wanting progressive policies. I live in Texas, so Ohio’s got it easy in that voters can actually make decisions for themselves.

We likely agree on the implications for democracy, but those do not impact “what the standards actually are.” If anything, I’m hewing to more objective standards than you run into today, in that objective context is what turns an antidemocratic diatribe into news.

I rose quickly in newspapering by standing up for values imparted upon me by an upbringing that cherished the role of shielding people from believing a political statement was itself news. I’m aware this feels out of place, but I’m keeping the goalposts where they were before all hell broke loose after 9/11. I ran my first professional newspaper at 24, 20 years ago, precisely because I told my bosses at my first paper whenever I thought they were veering off from objective journalism. The city ed there didn’t much like the fact that a kid kept questioning some of the editorial decisions, but when he got his own paper, he wanted that check.

I have been quoted by journalism professors over the years and didn’t end up at a metro obscenely young not because I didn’t have the opportunity, but because I wanted to change the world, which is far easier when you don’t have three layers of editors above you. I’m here for the same reasons I dropped out of college four times to get my career started: imparting actual news.

You are not being singled out, and what is happening in Ohio is wrong. But every time we allow outrage to move the needle on news value, the term loses more meaning … if there remains any left that’s consistently agreed upon.

As I said, I’m a columnist. That’s actually what got me in the door of my college paper. But I quickly learned that while it’s fun to spout off, far more fulfilling is letting voters know about the shenanigans their “representatives” get up to. But you can’t just give them column inches … they want people to hear their unedited bullshit, they can buy an ad.

In today’s environment, allowing that link to stand would have been saying to our user base (which seems to like the standards I proposed for U.S. News) “we said we’d stick with news, but here’s some political speech all the same,” thus creating a false equivalence that takes away from any gravitas built up around the late-20th-century model of journalism I’ve chosen to uphold and that the admins and community have shown approval for.

Making an exception here to the expectation of reported news would have been malfeasance.