The Star’s Self Satire

by David Safier

The Star indulged in self satire in today’s paper, but I’m the only one who knows it, so I want to share the moment with you.

The Star printed my letter in today’s paper. The point of the letter is, The Star has studiously avoided publishing information about McCain’s questionable connections to land deals that helped his friends and supporters. First was a NY Times article about McCain and Don Diamond, then articles on a different land deal in the Washington Post and Reuters, and most recently another suspicious deal in USA Today. I’m sure it’s part of a conscious campaign by the paper to protect McCain’s reputation from the odor of scandal.

The fact that The Star published my letter, allowing me to call Debbie Kornmiller The Star Apologist rather than Reader Advocate (though it used small letters where I used capitals, which diminishes my point that the latter is her formal title at the paper, and the former is more appropriate) might make the paper appear to be open to criticism. But the interesting thing is, while I was allowed to blast the paper, my most damning sentence against McCain was left out.

I’ve had many letters in The Star over the years, and I can’t remember being edited for content, ever. I’m obsessive about keeping my word count below the 150 cap so I don’t give the paper an excuse to cut my favorite line. In this letter, the paper edited my style in a few places, which is fine. But when I put in a reference to The Keating Five Scandal, I guess that might have tarnished McCain’s halo a bit, so they cut it out.

I’ll try to be fair here. The paper added 14 words at the beginning of my letter to reference it back to a Kornmiller column, so that put it over the 150 word limit. But that was the paper’s choice, not mine. And it doesn’t lessen my certainty that the Keating Five reference was cut out for the same reason the articles on McCain’s land deals weren’t published. To quote my own letter, “The Star has decided to avert its eyes whenever a story might sully McCain’s reputation.”

Here’s the letter. I’m reinserting my Keating Five reference where it belongs in the final paragraph, in brackets and in bold.

Re: the May 4 reader advocate column, “A look back at land-deal coverage.”

When Debbie Kornmiller defended the Star’s decision not to run a story on John McCain’s ties to Don Diamond, she sounded more like the Star apologist than the reader advocate. She claimed the paper already covered the story, and besides, the article got it wrong.

Since then, another story has surfaced about a 2005 land swap McCain pushed through Congress which involved a top campaign fund-raiser. Again, the Star chose to ignore it.

Maybe Kornmiller will once again say the story was covered in the Star or the article got it wrong. But it looks to me like the Star has decided to avert its eyes whenever a story might sully McCain’s reputation.

[The Keating Five scandal hangs over McCain’s head to this day.] If he is still peddling influence, the Star’s readers need to know, and McCain, not the Star, has the obligation to defend himself.