Bridgeport Beat: Locking horns with the Connecticut Post and its abysmal campaign coverage

BILL CUMMINGS

Maybe it was the headline. Yeah, it definitely was the headline that caught my attention.

The headline in Monday morning’s Connecticut Post read, Foster, Ganim lock horns during debate and it heralded a story by Bill Cummings concerning Sunday’s debate between the seven candidates for mayor of Bridgeport, which was held at the Klein Memorial Auditorium.

Lock horns. Hmmm.

As I read the first few paragraphs of the Post story, I became even more confused. The first graph led off with “Mary-Jane Foster came out swinging Sunday.” Cummings then referenced the following quote from Foster, “We are not addressing the 800-pound elephant in the room. Joe Ganim needs to tell us why we should trust him now when he lied to us for his own personal gain.”

Now, I was really scratching my head. You see I was there, and I happen to know that Foster made those remarks during her closing. If she had really come out swinging, she would have made those remarks about 90 minutes prior to when she actually uttered them.

Lock horns? Foster and Ganim? Maybe they have, but it certainly didn’t happen at Sunday’s debate. Ganim completely ignored Foster’s question and she was quickly put on the defensive after being harshly criticized by Charlie Coviello and Enrique Torres.

Lock horns? Not really. Ganim and Foster seemed to want to avoid each other like the bubonic plague or worse yet, they were in the sixth grade and one of them had cooties.

How could Bill Cummings and I have such a different take on things from the same debate? Oh, that’s right. Cummings wasn’t there. But that’s no surprise. He wasn't at the Columbus Day parade or the candidate's debate on WICC, but he had by-lined stories on both of those events as well. Actually that is typical of the coverage the Connecticut Post has given to this crucial Bridgeport election. In essence the newspaper’s coverage has been misleading, disingenuous and hypocritical.

Oh, and it’s also been error prone. Here’s a quick mistake, again from the Cummings article. The absentee reporter writes: “the debate included Republican Enrique Torres and four other lesser-known independent candidates — longtime activist Charles Coviello, Tony Barr, Christopher Taylor and David Daniels.”

Wrong, Mr. Cummings. Coviello is not an independent candidate, he is the nominee of a newly created party called the New Movement Party, a fact that the newspaper has known about since its inception, but apparently neither the reporter nor his editor bothered to trifle with that piece of information before okaying this collection of absurdities known as Foster, Ganim lock horns during debate.

Furthermore, the correct term is petitioning candidates and not independent candidates. And Mary-Jane Foster is not an Independent Democrat. She is a petitioning candidate along with Barr, Taylor and Daniels.

The term “lesser-known” is also particularly disturbing. I wonder if the reporter ran that term by Chris Taylor’s family what their reaction would be. The problem is the four candidates painted with this broad brush are only lesser known because media outlets such as the Connecticut Post have denied them fair coverage. There have been few if any mentions of them in the newspaper throughout the campaign, yet they are on the ballot for mayor and deserve equal time. Instead they get derogatory comments leveled at them by reporters like Cummings.

The Post is essentially trying to do its best to keep Ganim from returning to office. By giving any attention to these four “lesser-known” candidates detracts from the story line. The bad guy, Joe Ganim, against the two would-be saviors of Bridgeport, Foster and Torres.

Now Foster and Torres are two fine candidates and each has made strong case as to why they should be elected. Ganim is the perceived front runner at this point with Torres and Foster ratcheting up their forces for the hellacious final week of the campaign.

Yet, the Post is determined to keep gamin from winning. The editors will not give coverage to Coviello, Daniels, Barr or Taylor because it will take space away from the two candidates they believe have a chance of knocking off Ganim.

Ganim gets coverage, but the word “disgraced” pops up in every reference. He also gets treated to a greatest hits campaign every Sunday when the Post publishes lengthy articles about past crimes or speculates about misuse of funds during the campaign.

Please. Cover the election or simply ignore it. This would be funny if it weren’t so serious. But the type of shoddy journalism being practiced by the Connecticut Post is not a bad joke: it is a disservice to all of its readers and a slap in the face to professional journalism.