San Antonio's Clueless Liberal Media, and an Interview with Tom Kratman - Part 5

I rarely post about events relating to local affairs as they are usually of little interest to me. But just over a week ago a former conservative columnist for the San Antonio Express-News named Ken Allard - who was once a U.S. Army colonel attached to the 1st Armored Division in Bosnia, holds a Ph.D. from Tufts University's Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, and is an adjunct professor at the University of Texas at San Antonio (UTSA) - published an article at the San Antonio Lightning website wherein he discusses the sad decline of San Antonio's last remaining metropolitan newspaper. From the article, here is Allard's list of reasons for the paper's flagging fortunes:

1. Competence: Whether it is the NYT, the DNC or most large universities, the fact is that liberals either run things poorly - or run them into the ground. The SA-EN is no exception, having managed to lose both readers and money despite an effective monopoly over a large metropolitan area. How do you manage that, except by progressively alienating your own community? Keep in mind that I teach MBAs and business majors, few of whom feel the paper is in any way relevant to them. Like many other poorly-run businesses, the SA-EN has simultaneously managed to lose touch with both workers and customers.

2. Ethical Standards: Despite your self-serving rhetoric about "journalistic ethics," you're actually Pharisees acting from an exquisitely fine-tuned self-interest that disses or dismisses everyone else. Case in point: my column was canceled with no warning and a tardy phone call. No insincere accolades, false protestations of regret, or even a scintilla of understanding that - week in, week out - the paper had kept a readership who appreciated my writing. Do you think your other employees - the same ones you're counting on to bail you out - don't understand that too? That irony is the final riposte to Bob Richter's condescending boast (in a column this spring) "Get over it, Kenny, you're one of us media types now yourself." Sorry Bob, but I never sunk quite that low. Not even on the worst day I ever had.

3. Censorship: For some time, local audiences have asked me why the SA-EN often resembles a broadsheet for the DNC. My response has been that, after serving nearly thirty years as an intelligence officer, I was never censored so routinely, so off-handedly or with such inherent clumsiness as the last two years while writing for your editorial page. To be fair, not all the editing was bad because every writer makes mistakes that a competent editorial staff should catch. But they should NEVER make new ones, alter meanings or even delete entire sentences. I asked repeatedly to be allowed to make my own adjustments to space limitations. I was over-ruled without explanation or apology and am told that this is a common experience for others as well.

4. Bias: You will need to explain to your readers rather than to me why "budget cuts" necessitated my departure rather than my considerably more left-wing UTSA colleague, Mansour Al-Kikhia, whose Friday column characteristically slandered the Republican Convention. The irony is that I even offered to keep writing for free. You refused, a choice of which your readers should be made fully aware.

Col. Allard is spot-on with his analysis. In the fifteen years I have lived in San Antonio, the paper has become increasingly tone-deaf, elitist, and liberal. That this has happened is not at all surprising to me. When I was an undergraduate student back in the early nineties, the professor of a political science course I was taking invited Robert Rivard - then the managing editor of the Express-News - to speak to the class. During his remarks to us, Rivard revealed in typical left-elitist fashion that he had chosen to live in San Antonio because he wanted to show his children that "the whole world isn't Anglo."

Given what I've previously written about my own background, you can just imagine the metaphorical eye-rolling I did when he said that.

When Rivard assumed the position of the paper's editor-in-chief just over a decade ago, I figured that a sharp left turn would eventually come. And it has, for among the victims of recent "budget cuts" was the iconic cartoonist Leo Garza, author of the popular local comic-strip "Nacho Guarache" (a daily feature on the paper's editorial page) and a fellow native Laredoan and conservative Republican.

One would think that if one wanted to prove "the whole world isn't Anglo," he or she would keep someone of Garza's humor, wit, and experience around. But of course, in the eyes of white liberals, racial and ethnic minorities aren't really minorities if they identify with dastardly conservative Republicans.

Just so you know.

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Speaking of former Army colonels, here is the final segment of LaughingWolf's interview with Tom Kratman, posted at Blackfive.



Kratman speaks further about military science fiction and offers words of support to our troops abroad.