The Dispatch ganked my horny candidate story
Tell Gannett News it aint' about the money.
I never graduated from journalism school. I never took any classes, either. I burrowed my way into this trade through my lifetime dedication to the Tao of the Poster forged in the darkness of EverQuest message boards and jjhuddle.com.
I don’t even consider myself a journalist. I see myself as an average guy with operational defiance disorder who’s tired of watching boring losers, deranged sex pests and drunken fundamentalists run roughshod over people who have to work for a living.
I was adrift after voters in MAGA Country threw my Statehouse campaign in the dumpster in 2018. I retired from Eleven Warriors to get into the race. Though I knew I would lose, I figured I would work for one of the more talented and polished Statehouse candidates who had a chance to win.
They all lost, too.
The Rooster was born that December with “Adios Urban,” an article my former employer dubbed “The Worst Take of 2018” in an annual article they no longer run.
Nearly four years later, The Rooster has been featured in places like The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, The Miami Herald, and international tabloids. (Thanks, Le Papa de Dublin!) The Rooster has also been featured locally in Columbus Monthly.
However, one place it has not been featured is The Columbus Dispatch, which is weird because they ripped off my viral tweet about Franklin County’s audaciously horny Republican candidate for auditor without citation.
Guys with names like “Franco’s Ghost” and Greek philosophy avatars were in my mentions all yesterday, shrieking about me trying to shame a proud heterosexual man for having the audacity to lust for women in 2022.
No, I just think it’s hilarious that a guy is running to represent a county of 1.5 million people doesn’t have the mental bandwidth to keep his MILF fetish off the campaign timeline. That he was doing this for months without anyone noticing shows you how far the Republican Party has fallen in this city, not that I’m mad about that.
Hunting for hot single local MILFs is cooler than anything our current auditor, Michael Stinziano, has probably ever done in his life. The last time I heard Stinz speak, he talked about interning for some British pervert in parliament like that was something to brag about.
But Golden is the one who ran from his handiwork and hilariously claimed to have gotten hacked. The anti-abortion zealot forgot the first rule of being a Republican politician is never to apologize.
The tweet, sent at 5 o’clock on a Tuesday, did well:
I planned to expand on the tweet for today’s column because I didn’t think anybody in Columbus would cover the horny auditor candidate story. I was wrong. The local paper of record decided to run a column on Golden as if they had been tipped off themselves.
As it turns out, the absence was not a coincidence, as. the Dispatch’s reporter told me:
This is not the first time The Dispatch has removed The Rooster from the paper. A link was taken out of Bill Bush’s story about when I got in the city council’s ass about handing $750,000 to a local company selling spyware to employers. I was described as “Don Byrnes, who writes a daily internet newsletter on politics and current events.”
The Rooster name was left out despite me listing it as my occupation immediately after stating my name in the video The Dispatch cited for the article. There was no link, either.
I understand Dispatch editors probably went to my Twitter, saw my pinned tweet advertising President Xi Jinping’s Patriots Caucus with accompanying graphic art, and said, “Absolutely not.”
In discussions with past employees of the paper, a common theme that emerged is that leadership is deathly afraid of appearing too partisan, whether to the left (lol) or the right.
Gannett News’ business model for The Dispatch essentially involves not letting people cancel their subscriptions and other dubious billing practices. Their audience is older and brainwashed, mainly by the Cold War. They would probably have a coronary if they saw Communist China mentioned in a way that wasn’t at least casually racist.
I’m just a man with an internet connection. They’re the iconic brand backed by venture capital, even if that capital is also trying to strangle every penny out of the operation before they pawn it for parts.
But there are rules to this trade, and citing your sources is chief among them. And though this wasn’t outright plagiarism, it was right there in the gutter next to it.
The Rooster, for example, would cite the Devil himself if he comes correct with the facts, and it’s something I think would benefit my readers. I didn’t need to earn a fancy journalism degree or even take a class to understand that.
I wish I could say the same about the Dispatch’s editorial team. They don’t even have the decency to apologize.
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sad that the dispatch can't bark with the freaks