The Charleston Daily Mail’s Ry Rivard has an interesting story in today’s Charleston Daily Mail regarding former Congressman Ken Hechler’s campaign for U.S. Senate.
Headline: Hechler backers express doubts
Ry writes:
Ken Hechler has the backing of key members of the environmental movement, but even they don’t necessarily expect him to win the Democratic Party’s nomination for the state’s open U.S. Senate seat.
Hechler is running on a platform almost entirely devoted to ending mountaintop removal mining. The 95-year-old former congressman and secretary of state has long opposed forms of surface mining.
The danger for mountaintop removal opponents is that Manchin, a very popular governor, could easily defeat Hechler in the primary, for reasons that don’t necessarily have much to do with the coal industry. Still, the victory could be portrayed by the industry as proof that mountaintop removal has strong support among state residents.
Hechler himself comments on this issue in this story by the Gazette’s Alison Knezevich:
If I lose, it will not be a defeat for mountaintop-removal [opponents] because there are other reasons for why people will vote for Governor Manchin.
But the real news this morning is that Ry got this line into a story in the Daily Mail:
Also, polls suggest a majority of West Virginians oppose mountaintop removal, a point Hechler is making as he begins to campaign.
For those who question this summary, I outlined the findings of the publicly available polling data on mountaintop removal in the comments section of this Coal Tattoo post a while back.
Unfortunately, Ry also let Gov. Manchin’s campaign get away with its standard line about seeking a “balance” between jobs and the environment, without explaining why the governor’s mountaintop removal legislation really hasn’t done much to achieve any sort of balance.
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There is diffrence between what how the MTM story is told by the activists and the gazzette and how it is parcticed by the industry. Anyone would be opposed to the practices described in this paper, however, when they visit a completed site they always say “whats the fuss about?”
The MTM fear does a good job of supporting the enevironmental groups promoting that story – it drives donations. But the real environmental threat – lack of sanitary sewers – is not useful for fund raising so is never mentioned by these groups.
It would be nice if the Gazzette would acknowledge that IT is not always right and that IT is being manipulated by the environmental movement.
Do you ever get tired of being the news scold? Instead of criticizing other reports, maybe you could get off your duff and write your own. Why do you keep getting beat by the Pitt. papers as well as the Lexington and Louisville papers? Maybe you should address that in one of your press criticisms…
RealisticHillbilly,
First, absolutely I am not always right … I make plenty of mistakes in my reporting, and I try hard to acknowledge them and correct them. If you read Coal Tattoo on any sort of regular basis, you’ve seen plenty of examples of that (for example, this one, http://blogs.wvgazette.com/coaltattoo/2009/10/27/mining-death-reported-in-west-virginia/ …
I haven’t seen the Daily Mail retract any of the absurd things it has published regarding climate change … even when this blog pointed out their errors.
On the other hand … the idea that mountaintop removal is damaging the environment is not something the Gazette has made up, and it’s not an example of us being manipulated by the environmental movement. In fact, the Gazette was covering mountaintop removal long before most of the national environmental groups had even heard of it. And, the reporting we’ve done about the damage has been backed up by numerous government studies and scientific papers, most recently the paper in Science (only the world’s most prestigious peer-reviewed journal) that concluded mountaintop removal’s impacts are pervasive and irreversible …
http://blogs.wvgazette.com/coaltattoo/2010/01/07/bombshell-study-mtr-impacts-pervasive-and-irreversible/ …
Ken.
P.S. Actually, trying to address the threat from the lack of sanitary sewers (covered by the Gazette in our series on the Coal River, here, http://wvgazette.com/News/CoalRiverProblemsandpotential ) has been a pretty effective fundraiser for The Coal River Group, http://www.coalrivergroup.com/ ) …
XXXXXX,
Thanks for your comment … Yes, I do get tired of having to point out things like the serious misunderstandings of science that the Daily Mail frequently publishes regarding climate change …
The Pittsburgh, Lexington and Louisville papers do some great work on coal-related issues … So does West Virginia Public Broadcasting. So does the Associated Press. So does NPR … I could go on and on … and one of the great things about Coal Tattoo is that we here at the Gazette can point out that great work to our readers every day.
Best, Ken.
That’s funny, because whenever I’ve taken someone to a “completed” MTR site, they usually can’t say anything because they’re rendered speechless by the destruction. Sad little trees, scrubby grass and piles of rubble left behind by a coal company who declared bankruptcy instead of cleaning up after themselves, or who gets away with leaving an invasive species-covered plateau as “wildlife habitat,” doesn’t usually inspire odes to the wonders of MTR.