Newspapers Disappoint Community

The Orange County Register showed bias last November when it endorsed city council candidates. OCR employee Brian Calle has been blamed – whether or not he did it – for giving OCR’s endorsements to his buddies. In Mission Viejo, OCR endorsed incumbent Councilman Frank Ury and challenger Wendy Bucknum. Both ran on special interest money and support from Orange County’s corrupt power clique. While Ury won, Bucknum lost despite an enormous amount of free OCR advertising.

OCR touted its reason for endorsing Ury and Bucknum: they hadn’t taken union money. OCR’s implication was that other candidates did, which was false.

OCR’s national “news” articles tout the greatly exaggerated economic recovery and job market boom. In Mission Viejo, SVN publishes city hall’s happy-talk press releases and reprints from OCR. SVN also provides biased coverage for OCR’s endorsed candidates from last November. Bucknum is frequently photographed and quoted in SVN’s puff pieces. In SVN’s May 24 issue, Ury got a pass after he attempted to rig bids to favor one city vendor and eliminate all others in a street-sweeping contract. Instead of calling Ury out, SVN quoted and ran a photo of Councilwoman Trish Kelley as its report on the agenda item.

Additional information about Ury’s bid-rigging can be found on this week’s blog in another article.

Many Mission Viejo residents stopped reading SVN long ago, as evidenced by the number of unread SVN papers that remained in driveways week after week. The paper lacks connection with the community, and its pages are filled with advertorials and OCR reprints.

OrangeJuiceBlog last week revealed the shrinking numbers for OCR’s digital version – a decline many observers predicted after OCR put up a paywall. In the same OrangeJuice article, writer Greg Diamond describes OCR rolling out yet another print version, the Santa Ana Register. http://www.orangejuiceblog.com/2013/06/new-weekly-santa-ana-register-to-compete-with-internet-publications/

Despite all the reversals in strategy, OCR’s new management keeps going with the owner’s cash infusions. With declining print and digital readership, what’s next for OCR? In addition to launching the Santa Ana Register last week, it is throwing a new free paper, “Community News,” in Mission Viejo driveways. Everyone should acknowledge OCR is trying to stay in business.

Readers’ preferences haven’t changed. They want news, not biased material by unethical journalists, including tainted political endorsements. Ignoring Ury’s bid-rigging is typical of SVN’s non-coverage of local news.