Watershed Post: It's good to see the Freeman weigh in on this, now that this video has gone national.
Tony Adamis: We took a lot of flack for the length of time that it took us to respond, but we were just trying to be responsible about it. We took a kind of third-party approach to it. Even though I trust my correspondent, he and I both agreed that if any story was going to be run, it would be done by some other reporter approaching it as any reporter would. Plus, I took the time to do my own investigation.
It's a great and serious piece (unlike, say, the musings of this horrible person), and explains a lot of things. If you would like to take an inside peek at our newsroom, I recommend you give it a read.
Among the findings:
* Correspondent William Kemble was not taken off the Partition Street story, as many had thought:
Ariel (Zangla) had been working on that story for months. And William was working, for a shorter period of time, on the story on the earmarks issue. And after the earmarks story, the Hinchey camp complained about the characterization in that story having to do with the Partition Street Project, which led us to delay Ariel's story about Partition Street while we tried to do our best due diligence of looking at the complaint. The result was the second Kemble story. That wasn't even a planned story. It was really just a result of the complaint from the Hinchey camp. It's not true that [Kemble] had been taken off the story.
* Veteran Freeman reporter Paul Kirby once had the mayor of Kingston throw his own tape recorder at him. (That would be the late T.R. Gallo, not James Sottile - he throws drinks).
* The Freeman has been described as a right-wing paper.
* The Freeman has endorsed U.S. Rep. Hinchey over and over and over and over.
In conclusion, the Freeman is bipolar.
And everyone, it seems, remembers the incident differently. Hugh Reynolds of the Kingston Times even described that after the incident, Hinchey, "looked directly at the reporter, about 20 feet away, put his right hand around his throat and pointed at him with his left index finger."
Ouch.
Also, I wasn't there, but I remember it like this:
I know. I'm a horrible person.
UPDATE: Maurice Hinchey fans are hyperventilating because his lead is slipping, according to the Wall Street Journal. He's only up by a whooping 19 percentage points, according to internal polling, the Journal reports.
In other words, if true, he's set to crush George Phillips.
PANIC!
UPDATE 2: A korrecshun, Hinchey is up by 17 points in that Dem poll.
Hinchey Poll Memo
UPDATE 3: It should be mentioned that Republican polling has them tied.
The New York Times' FiveThirtyEight summarizes it neatly.
