NORTH FORK ELECTIONS

Silly Season’s Big Day
As the Big Day (Election Day) and the end of Silly Season nears, it’s time to inject some background into the journalistic rhetoric that’s been going around. Let’s start off with who exactly is telling you what.
If you are casting your vote without having attended or watched a single debate or Q&A session, then you deserve however you’re going to vote and whatever that brings upon you.
Some of you – through good old blind dumb luck – will vote for the correct candidate and all will be well in your world and you can go back to Slumberland and wake up the next time around. Many of you won’t, because …

The News Ain’t …
For those of you who are relying on the quasi reportage of the press for information to form opinions, may I – as a one-time member and/or contributor to all of the local press – disabuse you of that notion.
Journalists as a group – and unfortunately, against the tenets of what a journalist is supposed to be – have axes to grind, opinions to opine, and personal agenda to itemize. They have a place to do this called editorial pages, but it is unfortunately rare when the “opinions” on the editorial page do not bleed over to the “facts” of the news page.

Show Me The Money
Now, while unadulterated facts may be in short supply, this is not necessarily a subversive plot. Newspapers are privately owned businesses even though they robe themselves in loftier cloth. They are businesses, and businesses are intended to make money.
Newspapers – none of them – “make” money being sold on newsstand or via subscription. Advertising makes publishers, if not wealthy, certainly comfortable. How much heft the club of advertising dollars wields against a paper’s editorial is subject to a wide range of assumption that only a forensic accountant could straighten out, but if you think it doesn’t exist or is minuscule at best you’re beyond naïve. And never, ever discount the personal political agenda of journalists. Any of us.

Who’s What Here … North Fork News Wars
We – a North Fork we – had four papers available. Two maligned each other; the former Traveler Watchman and the Times Review/Suffolk Times. Those three newspapers maligned the other two: the long-running Suffolk Life and the upstart Independent.
As “Seinfeld’s” George Costanza noted: shrinkage occurs, and thus the newspaper scene on the North Fork has contracted.
The Times Review (TR) and the Suffolk Times (ST) remain. The Independent (ITW … not to be confused with the ICW which is the Intracoastal Waterway) forays onto the North Fork anew and anon via purchase of The Traveler Watchman.
Only Suffolk Life (SL) blithely continues untouched, and suddenly becomes – by default – more important than it ever was.
You see, the TR/ST and the ITW both support the same candidates in the North Fork town races (Democrats. Now wasn’t THAT a surprise?). (
(An aside: Yes, I know two of the candidates endorsed by both papers are Republicans. Why, one of them is even endorsed by a party! Unfortunately, because of the endorsers' choices, no one noticed they were Republicans.)

Factual Reporting
If you want to get unemotional, factual information on political candidates the only place is Suffolk Life.
Two or three weeks before the election they publish the ENTIRE questionnaire submitted to all candidate’s and in box chart format publish their for or against answers on an extremely wide variety of topics affecting each town.
This comes unaccompanied by journalistic verbiage, editor’s/reporter’s views, slants, summations, condensations or explanations. It’s pure news, pure fact.
Think you’re making an informed decision on this year’s election? If you gleaned your information from any source other than first hand or Suffolk Life’s questionnaire, all you’re working off is someone ELSES opinion.
And we ALL know what they say about opinions, don’t we?