PEORIA -- Here's a disgusting story that ran on Sept. 14 in the print edition of Peoria Journal Star, though it ran earlier in the Springfield newspaper, and is posted on that paper's website.
It involves a celebration of the trapping of otters in Illinois -- 2,000 killed last year.
Here's an email I sent to the author, reporter Chris Young:
As a journalist you should be ashamed of the story on otter trapping,
which ran in the Peoria Journal Star today.
It's totally one sided -- no effort made to interview people who view
trapping as cruel and inhumane.
Trapping is disgusting and should be banned, not celebrated. It causes
extreme animal suffering.
Otters are intelligent, lively creatures who should not be trapped for
their fur, which likely is going to Asia, given anti-fur attitudes
in the more enlightened world.
The price of fur? Ridiculous argument.
If people are so poor they need to trap to eat, they can get
food stamps.
If people want to get out into the outdoors, they should take cameras,
not guns and traps.
Photography is much more challenging than using a gun or trap on a
helpless creature.
It's biased stories like yours that fail to present other points of view
that cause backward attitudes in the US. For shame.
It's also biased reporting like this that has been killing US newspapers, as their reports do not present the whole truth: fair, accurate, comprehensive.
No wonder people won't buy newspapers any more.
Why an email and not a comment?
I don't do comments to the GateHouse
papers because they require a FaceBook log-on, exploiting the
individual's information on FaceBook for advertising and other
purposes. Astute web readers must have noticed that GateHouse/PJS web stories don't have many comments any more. They stopped when the FaceBook program began.
-- Elaine Hopkins