Calling All Wingnuts

As usual with these types of things, there is a lot more to the story than what we see at first glance.  Chris Graham is actually three dimensional and is not as cliche as we might like to believe (eerie resemblence to Chris Matthews notwithstanding).
So, without further ado, let’s get to his responses:

First, the long, “official” response, presented here without comment:

After reflecting on this story for the past few days, I’ve come to have a number of regrets that I thought it appropriate to share.
My first regret was that I gave any coverage to this story at all. It had seemed to me some time after I had posted my first story on this that Mr. Stark was perhaps going out of his way to create a scene for the purpose of engaging the news media in attendance and maybe that he even expected someone like me to report on the encounter in a way that would cast him in a bad light so as to pick a fight with somebody in the mainstream.
I’m not sure that I feel the same way now. As much as I don’t approve of his tactics personally, I have come to the conclusion that he is a sincere person who simply wanted to ask the senator a series of pointed questions about the issue of the day in the Allen-Webb race.
Another regret is involves the initial exchange between Mr. Stark and me. I think both that he could have presented his issues with my story on his encounter with the senator a bit more reasonably and also that I could have responded more professionally.
He has made available our exchange of e-mails, so you can get a feel for this for yourself. I don’t want to cast blame on Mr. Stark alone here, but I do want to point out that I was clearly willing to make the necessary corrections to the factual inaccuracies that he made me aware of - so I’m not sure that he needed to take digs at me for not asking the questions that he would like to see asked or for being busy “kissing authority’s ass.”
Several readers of Calling All Wingnuts, Kos and other blogs that have picked up on this have made similar attempts to get me to respond to their requests that I justify my supposedly inaccurate and sloppy reporting and desire to kiss the asses of those in power in general and Sen. Allen in particular and things of a similar nature.
I’ve challenged them all to go to www.augustafreepress.com to randomly pick out stories from the thousands of pieces that I have written on Virginia and national politics in the last four years and then get back to me about my biases and lack of writing and reporting ability and the rest.
I’m still waiting to hear back from anybody who took the time to do that.
A final regret that I’ll share is that I let myself take things personally at the outset of this exchange. I actually think this was a good experience for me to have to go through - well, except for the part about the Wanker of the Day award, which I hope means a trophy is in the mail, though now that I think about it, that would be one rather curious-looking trophy to have sitting on the desk in the office.
I understand that we live in a politically charged environment - and honestly, I think it’s good to see liberals standing up like this.
Conservatives dating back to the 1960s have been advancing the idea that the media is liberal - and through the sheer volume of their catcalls to this effect, they’ve forced the media to cower in the corner of “fairness” and “balance” while giving conservative politicians and organizations free rein to get away with murder, literally.
I’ve had to deal with more than my fair share of this BS myself.
I have never personally liked the characterization of the news media as being “the liberal media.” The reason should be obvious - as liberal as I or any other reporter might be on the issues of the day, our editors and publishers tend to be staunch conservatives, and guess who decides what gets published?
I’ve been fighting conservatives for years over this “the media is liberal” crap. It’s refreshing to see the criticism coming from the other side.
- Chris Graham

Next up, some quotes from emails he has sent to me since the exchange I chronicled yesterday:

I finally was able to take a few minutes to read through some of the comments on the Daily Kos - wow, I didn’t expect this kind of response, either.
I noted that at least one person wondered aloud why I hadn’t responded yet - with the implication that I was perhaps trying to avoid the issue.
I also noted that the rules for posting on the Kos Web site say that new comments won’t be posted for 24 hours.

I’m sure that this issue will have long since been forgotten by then.
I want to offer one bit of clarification about me and The Augusta Free Press that may or may not be helpful or even germane to the topic at hand.
I have been working in the media for 11 years - dating back to my first job as a part-time sportswriter at a small daily in Waynesboro, The News Virginian. My interest was politics writing - after dropping out of law school at the University of Richmond a year earlier upon deciding that I didn’t want to chase ambulances around the rest of my life.
Irony - small-town newspaper reporters chase their share of ambulances as well.
I left the mainstream media in 2002 to found The Augusta Free Press because I was tired of being told what stories to write and how to write them by small-town publishers whose main interest was not upsetting the local business and political community into canceling their advertising.

I’m scraping by - luckily, once you get used to making it on a reporter’s salary, and I was making $20K a year even with the box full of professional awards that I’d won in my years in the MSM, you can make it on basically nothing.

The AFP is my baby - I pick what stories to write, what issues to dive into, et cetera.
Given our location in the conservative Shenandoah Valley, we’ve taken our share of hits for writing extensively on civil-rights issues involving gays and lesbians and the treatment of ethnic and racial minorities and taking a strong stand in opposing the war in Iraq and the Bush administration’s activities in the so-called war on terror.

On the plus side, we’ve maintained a steady and respectable number of hits and readers - we average 50,000 hits a day and 7,000 unique readers per week.

I guess what I’m trying to get across is that I’m no more the establishment than any of the people writing on the blogs who have been trashing me as an arrogant tweed-wearing doofus who casts stones at others from an ivory tower.
It’s more true to view me as a law-school dropout who fell into journalism, came to love it, to the detriment of his bank account, and really can’t envision himself doing anything else more meaningful with his life.

Those who want to trash me can now at least trash me accurately.

and

I’ve attached my response.
I decided against doing a point-by-point kind of thing - and instead went with the approach of trying to deal with the issues from your post and the tons of e-mails that I’ve been getting today in a more traditional-type presentation.
I hope this suits. I wanted to emphasize the point that I made to you earlier - that as much as I might not have wanted to have to spend several hours dealing with e-mails about this story, I think it has been a good experience to see liberals finally taking up the cause of getting the media to represent their interests, given what we have seen from conservatives to that end dating back to the 1960s.
It’s about time the rank-and-file takes up this fight. I get e-mails from readers who want to take issue with the tone of coverage often - and almost all of them come from conservatives. If I had to hazard a guess as to the ratio, I would think 25-1 conservative-to-liberal wouldn’t be stretching it at all.
And we wonder why the media is leaning so far to the right these days …

Since this is my diary, I’m going to take the opportunity to put in the last word.
I don’t think Mr. Graham really addressed the substantive issue - my main accusation… that he fell into a cliche trap and wrote about a person with left of center politics in a sterotypical way…  that he also wrote about “authority” from a sterotypical perspective - giving them the benefit of the doubt and NOT calling them “combative” or calling them out for trying to evade a constituent…
That said, there is a lesson here.  Behind the ink and pixels are contoured hman beings.  They are going to make mistakes (and sometimes disagree with you that they did so).  But in the end, unless and until the writer proves beyond a doubt that they are beyond redemption, it probably makes sense to remember that the guy you are arguing with puts his pants on one leg at a time as well.
Am I sorry for any of this?  Nahhh…  In the end, from my perspective, Chris Graham deserved the “Wanker of the Day Award”.  He wrote what he wrote and chose to stand by it.  
But I’m not writing Chris Graham off.  As I wrote to him:

careful Chris,
I’m not sure if anyone has ever “unwankerized” before… not sure if the procedure is safe and I make no guarantees…  but it almost looks like you are boldly going where no man has gone…