I submitted a letter to the DH a few weeks ago. To the best of my knowledge, it's never been printed and I was never contacted by the newspaper about it. It was in response to this Hering commentary. Here is the letter as submitted:
While I would like to say that Democrat-Herald Editor Hasso Hering has trouble telling the truth because the truth is complicated, in this case, it's not, and plenty of other media outlets got it right.
In Hering's Saturday, September 13th commentary ("There's always more to stories"), he claims to debunk the now-infamous 'Bridge to Nowhere' story by noting that once Alaska Governor Sarah Palin saw how much attention was being given to that particular earmark, she dropped her support of it.
That's all that you'll hear from the editor. However, that's not the whole story. The very relevant fact that Hering fails to mention is that Palin only dropped her support after it was clear that Congress was not going to approve that particular earmark. In other words, she claimed to have been supporting the winning team the whole game when, for the first three quarters, she was rooting for what turned out to be the loser - and it was all on record.
For a record of how many times Palin and the McCain campaign have repeated this lie and the media outlets that have debunked it see http://thinkprogress.org/lies-nowhere/.
Hering complains about lying in politics, but then fails to tell the truth. How strange.
Dennis Dugan
Corvallis
I wonder why the DH declined to publish it?
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