http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=2611Pasadena residents didn’t get to read about the exploits of local celebrity Dr. Robert Nelson, who, besides being a Jet Propulsion Lab photo analyst who helped present those dramatic photos of Saturn’s rings and moons, also gave the lie to White House claims that the bulge seen on Bush’s back during the presidential debates was “just a wrinkle.”
They didn’t get to read Nelson’s account of how his photo analysis of Bush’s jacket—a story that would have increased speculation that the president was wearing a hearing device during the debates—almost made it into the New York Times before being killed by top editor Bill Keller (Extra!, 1–2/05).
They didn’t read all this in their local daily, the Pasadena Star-News, because senior editors at that paper killed the story on Saturday, April 30, right before publication in the Sunday edition—apparently for political, not journalistic, reasons.
The Star-News is the oldest holding of MediaNews Group, a newspaper and television station chain owned and run by William Dean Singleton, one of the U.S.’s more conservative media moguls. Singleton was singled out by Editor & Publisher (1/26/04) as one of several newspaper chain owners who contributed money to the Bush/Cheney re-election campaign last year. MediaNews Group also owns the Denver Post and the L.A. Daily News.
What role, if any, Singleton and his politics had in the killing of Star-News reporter Gary Scott’s story on Nelson and the Bush bulge is unclear. What is known is that the story was filed, edited and set to run, that a photographer had been assigned and had taken pictures of Nelson at home with his photo analysis equipment, and that it was killed at the last minute.
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