It's not often that you get two stories in the news that illustrate one another as perfectly as the attempt by a local group to force the Record-Eagle cut back on its aggressive reporting of local scandals and controversies, and the recent behavior of a group of supporters of the failed Traverse City parking deck ballot initiative.

A local group led by former Grand Traverse County Administrator K. Ross Childs is attempting to force the parent company of the Record-Eagle to change the paper's staff, saying they want the paper to be less "slanted" and "sensationalized." Just what exactly they have in mind was well illustrated a gathering of deck supporters after their recent electoral defeat. When a reporter for the Record-Eagle showed up at the meeting, they were thrown out of the meeting to the cheers of a small group that included Childs, and obscenities were hurled at the reporter. In the lead up to the election, the Record-Eagle had reported on State Senator Jason Allen's intervention to steer the deck contract to a political supporter, among other matters.

We think you can be pretty sure that the Record-Eagle's entirely appropriate, reasonable, and necessary coverage of Allen's involvement in the parking deck matter is a pretty good example of the sort of thing Childs and his group would like to force them to stop publishing. And we think the behavior of Childs and his friends at the meeting after the election is a probably a pretty fair exhibition of the anti-Record-Eagle's group's agenda. It's not about promoting balance or objective reporting. It's about shouting down those voices in our community that have the awful audacity to question the actions of the business interests and good old boy officials who long for the day--never to come again--when their decisions went unquestioned and unscrutinized.

Revised 8/15/06 9:15am