Doctor to patient: "Sorry to tell you this Lake Worth, but it looks like you got a case of the Menges."

The City of Lake Worth is a small town. The City of Lake Worth has approximately 36,000 residents, 4 blogs, 12+ Facebook 'community' pages, and now? Another newspaper. In a City of 36,000 residents. It is also covered more "globally" through the Palm Beach Post. For some perspective, the City of Lake Worth is one of 38 municipalities in Palm Beach County (PBC). PBC has approximately 1.4 million residents and growing rapidly. Lake Worth accounts for less than 3% of the residents in PBC. Less than 3%. Think about that for a moment. Who would have thought that a market exists for yet another media organ, one in print, to cover our little community?

Lake Worth for some odd reason has become embroiled in a debate over the role of "Community Journalism" and why local news isn't hard-hitting enough. Let's examine why Margaret Menge was "asked to resign" from a community newspaper in 2005, forced out from another community newspaper in New York (Cornwall-on-Hudson), and has nothing but bad things to say about another community newspaper in Key West. From 2005 until 2010, Margaret Menge's experience in 'community journalism' was not very respectful or representative of the communities she purported to 'cover' in the 'news'. These reports come from various online sources that amount to digital footprints. Now Margaret Menge wants, once again, to engage in 'community journalism'. 

Here is an article that appeared in 2005 from CBS News about Margaret Menge and her very short stint at a New Hampshire community newspaper [text in red is emphasis added]:

"It's the tale of a reporter named Margaret Menge, who had contributed to U.S. News & World Report, the New York Press, and the New York Observer, and who took a job a few months ago at the Union Leader, in Manchester, New Hampshire. Eight weeks later, she was asked to resign. She told Jurkowitz [Mark Jurkowitz, Boston Phoenix] that the managing editor for news told her that she came to the paper 'with a New York attitude. We do community journalism here.' "

Later in the article:

In a small town, of course, you are much more likely to run into the people you cover in the supermarket than you are in a big city. Randy Hammer, executive editor of the Pensacola News Journal (circulation 63,257 morning, 80,317 Sunday), says that fact "prevents you from taking cheap shots. You have to be able to sit down at breakfast the next morning and be able to face the person you wrote about and defend what you wrote about. It doesn't make you back off of doing tough stories…It makes you think hard about being fair."

That delves perfectly into the terrible 'news story' Margaret Menge wrote about Nadine Burns on January 23rd. Would Margaret Menge have the integrity to sit down with Nadine Burns and explain why she wrote things about Ms. Burns, crossing the line of innuendo to accusations? Of course not. Ms. Menge accused Nadine Burns of theft. How do you steal something that is free?

And lastly, from the 2005 CBS Story:

"Elite journalists want to believe that their counterparts in Des Moines or Oxford, Ohio are under pressure to print good news," he [Jay Rosen, New York University Associate Professor of Journalism who authors Pressthink] says. But Rosen says it's more complicated than that. He dismisses such an attitude as the "sentimental, self-flattering view of the elite."

Elite? Like someone looking to open a Charter School teaching The Classics?

In the latest "House Editorial" by Margaret Menge titled, "Truth and Advertising" she writes:

     And what's truth?

     Truth is something you can pin down pretty securely with a FEW [emphasis added] facts.

Just which facts are those? The ones one chooses to print and the ones that you don't? Doesn't that one line by Ms. Menge explain much about one's state of mind and approach to journalism? A "FEW" select facts? A "FEW" convenient facts? And then Ms. Menge talks of people who "modify the truth":

You're a fibber. A member of the half-truth society. No better than the rest of them.

We don't really know who "the rest of them" are. A little paranoia? As far as modifying "the truth", what did Margaret Menge do to Dina Clingman-Bell? Didn't Margaret Menge modify Dina Clingman-Bell's TRUTH to fit the narrative Ms. Menge wanted to create? Did Ms. Menge dishonor the truth because it didn't fit the story she wanted her readers to see? In a moment of introspection (or lucidity) Margaret Menge writes this:

But then also I like to sit and think for a moment whether it's at all possible that something I'm writing, a sentence or a whole idea, could be wrong, even though it seems well-supported.

Then there is this, when the editor goes from introspection to what can only be called, nonsensical babbling, writing this:

     Media bias is often more to do with what newspapers decline to cover than what they do cover. There is almost no coverage whatsoever of churches or of faith in most American newspapers, except in articles about the African-American community.

Where has this person been? Did she miss the news and coverage about Pope Francis. Pope Francis is an obscure news figure in the simple world of Margaret Menge. In next week's edition of Margaret Menge's paper she promises to, "write about our churches, and the faith of the people who attend them." Clutching the beads as I type this.

Below the editorial by Margaret Menge, the one she starts with the line, "I'm in the business of telling the truth" are two corrections to a previous edition of her newspaper. 

To Ms. Menge, a question: Is your new Lake Worth newspaper really a 'community' newspaper? Or are there other motives, perhaps not solely of your own, involved? Your community spirit, Ms. Menge, didn't go over very well in Manchester, New Hampshire or Cornwall-on-Hudson, New York or Key West, Florida. And now you're giving 'community journalism' another shot in Lake Worth, Florida, just 53 days before a municipal election in Lake Worth? 

You have heard it said that there are no coincidences.