At What Cost? (Ithaca is the City of Evil/Media Bias alert)

When I was growing up, there was a popular bumper sticker, seen mostly on the back of old VW vans that said: "What if there was a war and nobody came?" I am reminded of that bumper sticker now, in light of this administration's unprecedented attack on civil liberties. What if our basic rights were taken away and no one noticed? What if our system of checks and balances was destroyed and everyone remained convinced it was happening to someone else?

Under current legislation, if you are "suspected" of terrorist activity, you can be picked up and held indefinitely, without charges and without access to a lawyer. If your loved ones call to find out where you are or if you are okay, they will be told nothing. After all, to disclose your whereabouts would infringe on your right to privacy. Don't bother clutching your passport to your chest; this law applies to all U.S. citizens.

And, if currently proposed legislation - PATRIOT Act II - passes, you may no longer even be a citizen. Under PATRIOT II, if you attend a legal protest sponsored by an organization the government has listed as "terrorist," you may be deported and your citizenship revoked. This is true even if you are only suspected of terrorist activity and nothing has been proven. More specifically, according to FindLaw's Anita Ramasastry, a U.S. citizen may be expatriated "if, with the intent to relinquish his nationality, he becomes a member of, or provides material support to, a group that the United Stated has designated as a 'terrorist organization.' "

I wish this were an exaggeration. The attack on civil liberties hasn't been subtle; rather it has erred on the side of being so extreme as to seem surreal

This completely one-sided article was in the news section of the paper, not the editorial.

Ithaca may very well be the city of evil, and this may be the newspaper of evil.

However, given the byline, the first-person perspective and the tone, this column makes no pretense of being an objective news report. No one's trying to hide the fact that it's an opinion column.

Okay. I already have intense personal reason to hate the Ithaca Journal. My only son was killed in a hiking accident there on March 16. The way the IJ reported it, he was goofing around in a dangerous area away from the rest of his party and most likely brought it upon himself. However, after talking to the other four people in his party, all very experienced hikers, what happened was just a tragic slip on some black ice, and the five were all together--no one, including my son, was fooling around. But the IJ ran with it as the lead, complete with a picture of the rescue team pulling his body on a sled.

I contacted Anne Ju, the reporter, by phone and a number of emails. I gave her the straight story, and advised her of the State Police report which corroborated what the four had told me. I gave her the names and phone numbers of the other four hikers. I also complained about the picture, which to me was just sensationalizing my son's death for their pitiful rag (though I didn't put it that way to her).

At first Ju defended her piece, saying she had received the info at the scene from one of the hiking party. The fact is, she spoke to the most emotionally distraught of the group just minutes after his dear friend fell into a gorge and died--and after he tried desperately to save him. He couldn't have gotten his own name right at that point, let alone the dispassionate facts about what happened. (Did Ju bother to ask anyone else? Noooooooooo.) After I pointed this out, and reiterated that the police report contradicted hers, Ms. Ju promised me directly to run a correction. She further said her editor consented to that--but no retraction of or apology for the picture.

To this day, to my knowledge, there has been no retraction or correction whatsoever to anything, nor has Anne Ju responded to my last emails asking why.

The IJ was not interested in the facts, nor in the tragic aspects of Jeremy Shannon's death--only in the headline it induced and in filling column space to sell papers.

The Ithaca Journal is the newspaper of evil, and I do mean EVIL.

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