Palm Beach Post

Palm Beach Post columnist Jose Lambiet (photo) is so desperate to defend the indefensible that he is now basically telling his readers that what they saw they didn't see. In this case, Lambiet is claiming that his column wasn't political even though that is exactly what it was from playing the class resentment card against the parents of  neurosurgeon Michael Lemole who treated Represenstative Gabrielle Giffords  by revealing the value of their homes to snarking about how they contributed to Tea Party candidates.

Here is Lambiet now protesting that his politically charged column wasn't political:

Michael Lemole is a neurosurgeon who has been treating Rep. Gabrielle Giffords. However, that noble work wasn't enough to keep Palm Beach Post Page 2 Live columnist Jose Lambiet (photo) from dragging his parents through the mud for the "high crime" of supporting Tea Party candidates. Somehow Lambiet thinks it ironic that while the son has worked to save the life of Giffords, his parents are associated with a group that Lambiet absurdly claims provided "fertile ground" for the likes of Jared Loughner. Lambiet kicks off his odious column by snarking about how wealthy Lemole's parents appear to be:

Updated with correction below.

How embarrassing is it when a senatorial candidate sits down with your own editorial board and issues a statement so absurdly mendacious that the video clip of the "Pinocchio moment" becomes a big hit in the blogosphere yet your own story about the interview completely misses it? Such was the case with the Palm Beach Post. Charlie Crist sat down for an hour long interview with its editorial board and declared that he would still have left the Republican party even if polls had shown that he was running 20 points ahead of Marco Rubio in the race for the U.S. Senate seat from Florida. Here is a transcript of that memorable magic moment:

Q: But if you had been 20 points up in the polls over Mr. Rubio would you have left the party to run as .an independent?

A: Absolutely. Yes. I absolutely would have. Because I think it's that important. Sure. I would have...

There is a conservative student group at our sacred campus club rush. Remove them immediately!

Such was the attitude of Palm Beach State College administrator Olivia Ford-Morris at the sight of a Young Americans for Freedom table. You can see and hear the extreme urgency in the attitude and voice of Ms Ford-Morris accompanied by campus security guards in this video as she demands the students at the YAF table "Pull it up!" Although Ford-Morris claimed she didn't remember receiving either an e-mail or a phone call from YAF about getting a table for club rush, evidence is now contradicting that claim (below the fold).

So this is obviously a great story of campus censorship that the Palm Beach Post would love to cover since it happened locally? Wrong. The only comment from the Palm Beach Post on this incident is the sound of crickets chirping. To get information on what happened at Palm Beach State College you would need to check sites on the blogosphere such as Orlando Political Press:

(Lake Worth, FL) On Tuesday September 7, 2010 at around 11:00am one Palm Beach State College (PBSC) student and two Young Americans for Freedom (YAF) members, state chairman Daniel P. Diaz and state vice chairman Eddie Shaffer, were shut down and had campus police called on them after tabling and recruiting during club rush at the College. The PBSC student, Christina Beattie, had received prior permission from college administrator Olivia Ford-Morris to promote her organization on campus via telephone and email communication.

Pick out a pleasant outlook,
Stick out that noble chin;
Wipe off that "full of doubt" look,
Slap on a happy grin!
And spread sunshine all over the place,
Just put on a happy face!
Put on a happy face
Put on a happy face!

It is a scene that has been played out quite a bit recently. A newspaper publisher delivers a grim announcement of yet more employee cutbacks in the newsroom. So how should the remaining employees react when asked about the cutbacks? According to the former publisher of the Palm Beach Post, the employees should simply put on a happy face and deliver the type  of fake upbeat response that the same journalists wouldn't tolerate when investigating stories about corporate layoffs.

The Broward-Palm Beach New Times alternative newspaper sets the scene in a fascinating article about the rapid decline of the South Florida newspaper industry:

It wasn't exactly an obituary but it sure sounded like one when Palm Beach Post publisher Doug Franklin announced staff cutbacks at that newspaper today much larger than anyone had expected. The worst case scenario projected a cut of no more than 100 newsroom staff but, as posted in Bob Norman's The Daily Pulp, the final number was much larger:

-- 300 jobs will be cut company-wide.
-- 130 newsroom jobs will be cut.
-- Buyouts are being offered to employees with at least five years vested in the pension plan.

Here is the obituary-like memo from publisher Doug Franklin announcing the near death experience of the Palm Beach Post:

June 25, 2008

To: All Employees of Palm Beach Newspapers, Inc.
Re: Reduction in Workforce Plans

I am writing today to advise you of the changes that will begin taking place throughout our company this week.

San Francisco Chronicle’s Carla Marinucci dutifully dusted off the same liberal talking points we hear every four years about Republican nominees: the women in their own party hate them.

In her front page article, Marinucci found no conservative Republican women to defend McCain or critique him from the right, but she found three Republican, including Obama backer Susan Eisenhower, and two Democratic women to slam McCain.

But as might be expected in the liberal media, the largest reason these liberal Republican women won’t vote for McCain was chalked up to "women’s rights," code words for abortion. The article devoted a special section to McCain's stance on abortion. Of course this ignores the fact that millions of socially conservative Republican women backed equally pro-life candidates such as Mike Huckabee or Mitt Romney in the primaries.

This is the sort of report that immediately gets my BS detector up. A recent Palm Beach [Fla.] Post story is trying to claim that Americans are running to Europe to claim dual citizenship because the U.S. is so horrible for everyone here. Yet, even as the story is making the claim that more Americans are fleeing this country for Europe, it offers no statistics to prove it. And the Post even admits that there are none to be got. So, in essence, all we end up with is a claim and nothing but circumstantial and anecdotal evidence with no real facts to prove anything. But this piece does, however, succeed in bashing the USA at every turn.

The first sentence sets the tone of lament that the rest of the piece carries by giving the reader a sense of something lost, a foreboding that foreshadows the end of the prominence of the United States of America.

From windy Washington, D.C., to sunny Palm Beach, Florida, the liberal print media are refusing to note the liberal bent of an interest group vocal in the health care debate.

The March 26 edition of the Palm Beach Post -- a broadsheet notorious to conservatives for its unbalanced treatment of Rush Limbaugh -- featured not one but two articles which pushed government-run universal health care. In both of them, the Post asserted that Floridians are dying daily due to a lack of health care coverage.

The source for the Post’s assertion was a recent study by the liberal group Families USA. Not surprisingly, the Post described the organization as simply a “nonpartisan” group that advocates for “comprehensive health care” while conveniently leaving out the group’s liberal tendencies, its support of socialist-style universal healthcare and that its political allies include liberal Democratic politicians such as Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) and former Sen. Tom Daschle (D-S.D.)

The Palm Beach Post was caught in a bit of deception by one of its readers over the weekend. At issue was another globaloney alarmist story the paper printed on July 25th, titled "This century hotter than last, group finds," supposedly by Post writer Dara Kam. Unfortunately for the reputation of Dara Kam and that of the paper, this "article" was merely a rewording of the press release of an environmentalist group calling themselves, Environment Florida. An alert reader who wrote in calling them on it also exposed several other papers across the country that did the very same thing.

Naturally, the article by Kam was all worried about how the summers are getting hotter and informing the reader of new globaloney legislation pending in the Florida state house in Tallahassee. It all seemed rather like our intrepid writer had done a whole bunch of research for this attempt at writing a “science” article.

But Post reader Gary Bokelmann wondered how this “article” could be nearly a word for word rehash of a press release put out by the environmental group and still be claimed an honest news article? And not only did the Palm Beach Post merely rephrase a press release, so did several other papers, Bokelmann found.