Open letter to Jake Wagman ...

Dear Jake:

I know I've been a bit heavy handed in my criticism of the local print media, especially since Lee Publishing took over the formerly Pulitzer-owned Post-Dispatch and buried its reliability.  But I thought I should point out a few things.

First, your piece on the Jaco vs. The Blogger story which is now all over the WWW.  You wrote this on Thursday:

Charles Jaco cited for peace disturbance for bumping blogger

Radio and television personality Charles Jaco has been cited for peace disturbance after a run-in with a conservative blogger last week.

Or, rather, it was a “bump” in.

Jaco was covering a healthcare rally downtown last week when local blogger Adam Sharp — nom de web, Sharp Elbows – confronted the Fox 2 reporter and KTRS host for his use of the term “Tea Baggers” in describing the anti-Obama Tea Party movement.

Tea Baggers is not a flattering term. To find out why, check out the Riverfront Times, which first reported Jaco’s citation this morning.

And on and on, blah blah blah.  I know it's not important to you, and I know that the Post has a policy of not crediting bloggers (as expressed to me by Deb Peterson), but I had this story online four days before you and the RFT did.

Four days. And I've been after Jaco's phony reporting for months and bogus lawsuit threats and you and the rest of your P-D goobers haven't written a thing about it.

In fact, one of your commenters said this: Yo Jake, give credit where credit is due. The Riverfront Times was NOT the first to report on this. St. Louis Media, http://www.stlmedia.net was the first – they reported this on Monday. Stop this media group hug and give proper credit where it’s due.

Okay, though, not a problem.

Second, the big issue is your story on the Russ Carnahan shooting exercise at the STL Police Academy.

You cut-and-pasted a freaking press release with BS information! You published this photo, provided by Carnahan's people:

And you never noticed that there was no eye or hearing protection worn by anyone or that the pistol had an orange tip, rendering it a practice handgun.  Along with this photo of Russ Carnahan shooting a laser-practice range gun, you showed this target to tell us how well he shot:

Please 'splain to me how Carnahan shot three holes in the target with a handgun that only sprayed red light beams.  Magic?

To your credit, you eventually added a correction.

Jake, that's two.  In one week.  I can't imagine anyone who's impressed.

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