I have misread the intentions of the person or persons who have written the Southern Watch blog over the years, but it sounds like the days of the blog being a thorn to those in power at Missouri Southern State University have come to a close.
In a post dated June 4, and titled "Thank God," the first one since August 2013, the blog gave its stamp of approval to new MSSU President Alan Marble:
And now the MSSU Board of Governors has finally inhaled the fresh air that comes from not breathing with one’s head up one’s ass.
Alan Marble is our president. And we can now stand down.
We wish Dr. Marble well. And we hope (former MSSU Board of Governors President) Dwight Douglas develops a persistent, chronic and never-ending rectal itch.
The anonymously written blog played a key role in informing the public of the problems taking place at the university under the Bruce Speck administration.
When the Joplin Globe abdicated its responsibility to report the truth about MSSU, the public was left with three sources, the students at the university newspaper, The Chart, Southern Watch and the Turner Report.
Speck cracked down on the Chart, firing its adviser T. R. Hanrahan, while the Globe not only failed to come out in support of student journalistic freedom, something newspapers have always done, but actually offered advice to Speck on how to manage the media and offered him ideas of positive news stories that could be written about the university and Speck's leadership.
That information was uncovered thanks to a Sunshine Law request filed by the young Chart reporters. By that time, the Chart's had been stripped of its ability to do much of anything about Speck, so it posted an e-mail from Globe Publisher Michael Beatty to Speck online in a collection of the documents that had been received through the Sunshine Law request.
The Turner Report brought attention to the Beatty-Speck e-mail since it reveals so much, not only about the Globe's coverage of the Bruce Speck administration, but in everything it covers to this day.
With the Chart neutered, the only information revealing that everything was less than sunshine on the campus came from Southern Watch and the Turner Report.
Though it was sometimes profane (right up to the last word of its June 4 post), Southern Watch was able to capture the mood of much of the campus and also kept a sharp focus on criticism of Speck and his leadership team.
I have no idea who the anonymous blog writers are, but I would almost bet they had the same reaction as I did after Bruce Speck's resignation when an anonymous editorial writer at the Joplin Globe said we must never let what happened during Speck's tenure happen again.
In other words, the things that Southern Watch and the Turner Report and for a brief, shining time, the Chart, reported and make no mistake about it, both the Chart and I were made to suffer for our reporting and those at Southern Watch probably had even more to lose and the Joplin Globe refused to report were the things the Globe said must never happen again.
If this truly is the end of Southern Watch, we owe the blog a debt of gratitude for doing what H. L. Mencken said reporters should do- Comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.
If only Joplin had a newspaper that was willing to do the same thing.
1 comment:
Well-said. Sometimes I want to give the benefit of the doubt and think that Stark would see the error of her ways, but then I think of the suffering that was allowed to continue on her watch. It's an amazing thing to witness, the way a mind warps reality in order to maintain that they were always on the right side of history, as in the case of the Globe and the post-Speck editorial... anonymously written, lest we forget.
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