Yesterday Michelle Malkin quotes Deborah Simmons writing in the Washington Times with her saying that someone should be standing up for the Boys & Girls Clubs in regards to all the bad publicity the group is getting via the Gloria Wise/Air America funding scandal. I did address this in one of my posts the other day where I printed this disclaimer:

[Update: 3:20PM — Disclaimer] It finally dawns on me that this might be important information. My brother-in-law is the President and CEO of the Boys & Girls Clubs of Santa Monica. I have calls into him for any information that he might be able to relay to me on the Gloria Wise situation, but he is on vacation and is not calling me back. Hopefully when he returns we can sit down over some coffee and he’ll be able to give me some background on how these clubs are funded and what is involved when the national organization decides it is necessary to disenfranchise a member club.

The Boys & Girls Clubs of America do a lot of fine work with American youth, especially with disadvantaged kids in the inner cities. My wife’s brothers and her son went to the Santa Monica club, as did my son during his not-often-enough summer stays out here during the ’90s. What has happened in the Bronx club most assuredly is not indicative of how this organization is being run, and no one should take my slams at Cohen and Co. & Air America to be at all directed at the B&G Clubs themselves. [end Disclaimer]

Well, my brother-in-law got back into the office this AM and gave me a call. Here is what I learned from him about the B&G Club organization, and what I didn’t learn about the AA/GW affair.

First, he didn’t know anything about what was going on at the Gloria Wise club. That’s not too suprising since he has been away on retreat for over two weeks and none of the major papers has written about it until this last weekend. Allan told me that he is now responsible for all 88 Boys & Girls Clubs in Southern California and is involved with the national club’s government relations committee, but he would not be involved if the national organization made the decision to disenfranchise the Gloria Wise club. He did say that this could be done if any illegality was found to have happened.

Each Boys and Girls Club is an individually controlled entity. They are not “directed” at the national level. If Gloria Wise is forced out of the B&G Clubs, it could still exist as a youth club, it just would not be a part of that organization.

I made the comment to him that as long as I had known him, (almost 17 years), I saw him constantly “raising” money for the Santa Monica club, and never saw him trying to “give it away” to anyone else. He laughed and said to me, “You got that right, buddy.”

I know that this certainly isn’t ground-breaking news of any kind. But like Ms. Simmons, I feel that there needs to be support expressed for this important organization. Hopefully another group of folks in the Bronx will be able to organize a new club and continue this work.

Somehow I missed this on Saturday. After the brouhaha over the way the NY Times quoted Al Franken, leaving out or changing words which also “changed” the meaning or at least the intensity of the statement in the quote, they must have gone and got some religion because they released this “correction”, among others, in the Sat. edition.

An article yesterday about state and city investigations of a loan made by a Bronx social service agency to the liberal radio network Air America quoted incorrectly from comments made on the air by Al Franken, the host of an Air America program. Referring to Evan M. Cohen, a former official of the network whom Mr. Franken accused of having engineered the loan, from the Gloria Wise Boys and Girls Club, Mr. Franken said: “I don’t know why they did it, and I don’t know where the money went. I don’t know if it was used for operations, which I imagine it was. I think he was robbing Peter to pay Paul.” (He did not say: “I don’t know why he did it. I don’t know where the money went. I don’t know if it was used for operations. I think he was borrowing from Peter to pay Paul.”)

I’m sure that in the print edition this was in a list form, stuck wherever they found room. If someone reads the print version maybe they could tell me where it was. Taking a look at the rest of the MSM biggies that I have been monitoring shows up as follows:

Washington Post – finally, on the 13th, & they quoted Franken correctly!
Chicago Tribune – still — not a chance, guess they don’t read NY papers in the Windy City!
Los Angeles Times – again, no way, Jose! (And we thought that reading was fundamental.)

So, the NY Times “broke” the story in the MSM press last Friday, but mis-quoted a major player in the story, then “corrected” that the next day. The Washington Post followed the NYT lead on Saturday. No one else? Not any of the biggies. Michelle has links to some of the “minors”. Captain Ed mentions the AP article that circulated on Saturday and prints a list of MSM outlets that “should” have picked up the story. I know after having searched the LA Times that it did not. Says a lot about our local rag — doesn’t it?

Brian Maloney. Radio Equalizer, posts a letter from a mid-western newspaper publisher who would have featured the AP story over the weekend if he had been aware of it. Says Brian:

Yes, it appears David Caruso’s AP story was confined to regional wires. Somehow, a national radio network’s scandal is considered of interest only to New York readers.

Amazing! Just, amazing! (db)

This entry was posted on Monday, August 15th, 2005 at 4:18 pm and is filed under Fever Swamp Madness, Media Bias. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.  |   Print This Post  |   Email This Post

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