Seems we’re getting closer to figuring out why a News Leader reporter has been helping lead an effort of disaffected local Dems to try to discredit Augusta Free Press.
Lyra Bordelon appears to think she should be able to use AFP to kneecap … AFP.
“I’ve done my best here to engage in good faith on a neutral platform where I can’t be blocked,” Bordelon wrote, in a comment on a thread on a local Reddit forum that, for some reason, I let myself get dragged into.
She was complaining there that she’d been blocked from commenting on the AFP Facebook page after using our page to advance her unsubstantiated claim that we had plagiarized a local blogger.
ICYMI
Sorry, not sorry, but, no, a writer for one news outlet doesn’t get to use the resources of another to attack, you know, the other.
Right?
The comment about using a “neutral platform” was a response to my suggestion that Bordelon has a byline in the Leader, which itself has a Facebook page, where, presumably, she “can’t be blocked.”
You want to accuse us of something, use the Leader and its Facebook page to accuse us.
Am I out of bounds here?
We can guess that Bordelon doesn’t think much of the size of the reader base on the Leader website and on the outlet’s Facebook page, to think that she needs to use ours.
***
The backstory here is, Bordelon is one of the merry band of pranksters who decided that a column that I wrote over the summer on a local library board canceling a Pride event was out of bounds because I didn’t reference a blogger who was at the meeting.
The blogger, to this day, hasn’t reached out to me to address whatever concerns she may have had; instead, she used the opportunity as an excuse to claim victimhood status, and to try to draw attention to her Substack, which has in the range of 200 subscribers.
There are other, better ways to get attention; had the Substacker emailed or called, for instance, and said, Hey, could you add a link in your column, on your website with millions of page views, which is attached to a Facebook page with 97,000 followers, I would have done so without hesitation.
Hell, I’d have given her a regular byline, if she’d asked, same as we’re doing for:
- Zachary Caudle, a Rockingham County blogger who focuses on issues with Flock cameras.
- David Driver, a former DNR sports editor who has two niches, local sports history and former local college basketball players now playing in the Euroleague.
- Ray Petree, an aspiring pro wrestling writer and podcaster.
- Michael Schoeffel, a local firefighter whose pieces for us trend more toward New Yorker quality than daily news. Seriously, his stuff is too good for us, by an order of magnitude.
- Dori Zook, a recent addition, who covers issues for us in the local Mennonite community.
And that’s even accounting for the long list of bloggers who write on national issues, but if you’re a regular reader, you see a variety of opinions on our pages daily.
Left unsaid by the Substacker is: we offered, months ago, to chronicle her in a feature story, which only fell through because she was hard to pin down for an interview time.
No enmity with the young lady at all.
At worst, the issue that the Substacker, Bordelon and Co. have with us would involve a simple oversight on our part, easily corrected.
The approach the merry band has been taking to getting attention for themsleves suggests to me that they think the better approach is to use a flamethrower.
***
To the Reddit thread from this week: man, I studiously avoid getting dragged into these things, because I’d rather spend the time that you waste arguing nonsense with self-styled media critics researching or writing a story, recording a podcast, going for a run, anything else.
The original focus of the person who started the discussion was legit – a critique of coverage of the Sept. 22 officer-involved shooting in Staunton that led to a lamentation of how our local media outlets just lack adequate resources to do what we need to do.
The thread was brought to my attention by an AFP reader who thought I might want to weigh in, and I did, sharing thoughts on how we’re very much in a media desert here locally, and how we need to support what little we have left in terms of resources, from the News Leader and its three journos, and AFP and its one, me.
Bordelon decided to use this thread to renew her baseless attack on the Pride event column, posting, by way of boasting:
“I said I would speak to you about my concerns in a public or private setting before.”
O … K.
Problematic, apparently, is that I pushed back, pointing out the inconvenient example of her colleague at the Leader, Patrick Hite, reporting on the move by Kelvin Washington to drop out of his Waynesboro School Board race by making it out to be that Washington had merely announced in a release sent to the Leader on Monday that he was out of the race.
That’s leaving out … everything that actually happened.
Washington didn’t just up and decide to drop out of the race on Monday; he left the race because of reporting from AFP that began last week, on Thursday, with a piece about a Washington supporter making false accusations against Washington’s opponent, Debra Freeman.
We followed up that report on Friday with a story in which Washington denied knowledge of the discussion between the supporter and Chanda McGuffin-Tucker, a local nonprofit leader who had been advising Washington’s campaign, with our reporting revealing that McGuffin-Tucker had admitted to planting the false accusation, in effect, taking the fall.
It was on Saturday, then, that Washington told us that he was dropping out of the race; Saturday, two days before the Leader caught wind of any of what had transpired, and only then through a press release sent to them by email.
I asked Bordelon straight up if she was “prepared to offer the same criticism to your cohort, Patrick Hite, for failing to acknowledge how the Ward C School Board race story evolved,” noting that, unlike in the Pride event column case, “I didn’t happen to show up at a meeting where something happened there,” that the Kelvin Washington story literally does not become a story without AFP digging into it.
“If you’re going to criticize me in a public forum for writing a column on a public event reported on by another, I would expect you to criticize your colleague for a far more egregious breach,” I wrote.
“When I look at Patrick’s story, I see a summary of the state of a political election, rather than a breakdown of how we got there,” Bordelon responded.
Sure, Jan.
***
Since we’re slinging arrows, it probably needs to be pointed out that Bordelon is also perfectly OK taking credit for the Jim Wood-Pete Buttigieg story from 2022, in the course of her puff piece on Wood’s Waynesboro City Council re-election campaign, in which she detailed asking Wood about his “Pete Buttplug” slur, which came to light, how exactly?
Yeah, that was AFP – not from showing up at a meeting where something that was going to happen anyway went on and happened, not from getting a press release, but doing original reporting, in the case of the Wood-Buttigieg story, monitoring Wood’s since-shuttered weekly podcast, which provided several nuggets over the course of several months.
You wouldn’t know that from Bordelon’s reporting, but then, that’s OK, because the media critic not only doesn’t criticize her colleague, she isn’t going to turn the red pen on herself.
It’s clear why: her media criticism wasn’t about actual media criticism.
She’s doing the same thing that the upstart Substacker is trying to do – punching up, and with me writing this column, I assume she’s thinking right now, success!
You punch up hoping that the person above you punches back, in hopes that the fight gets you up to their level.
This is what you see a lot in politics, when the challenger picks a fight with the incumbent over debates that the upstart sees as a win-win – either the incumbent agrees, and we get to stand on the same stage for an hour, or doesn’t agree, and we can claim that they’re running scared.
Nobody reading this far is ever going to confuse me with Ben Cline.
The Leader folks want to be media critics, well, I can play that game.
There’s an old saying that would seem to apply here – be careful what you wish for.
