Editor’s Note: The $1.8 million grant recently awarded to the South Raquette Water District was a federal Environmental Protection Agency State and Tribal Assistance (EPA STAG) grant, not a USDA grant as reported in the March 16-22 edition and briefly on NorthCountryNow.com. Rep. Elise Stefanik is listed as a Requester from the House on page 147 of the bill, as are Senators Chuck Schumer and Kristin Gillibrand. The bill can be viewed at https://bit.ly/4ajqzI6 . North Country This Week regrets the error. 

I really don’t want to see the editors of North Country Now as partisans who skew the news to push their readers to the right.

But it’s gotten increasingly difficult, given how the paper handles our House Representative and bail reform law.

Representative Stefanik has a long and well-documented history of spreading misinformation and outright lies. Her press releases contain vitriol instead of facts. And yet NCNow regularly copies them and pastes them into the paper, giving them an aura of reputability that they do not deserve.

Just recently, the paper ran an article: “Massena water project fully funded with help of federal grant.” Representative Stefanik then bragged on social media about securing the funding for her constituents. It fell to the users of Twitter, not the journalists of NCNow, to point out a rather important piece of context: Stefanik had, of course, voted against the bill that provided the funding.

What did NCNow do about their misleading article?

Nothing.

For 40 hours the context-free article, which centered on Stefanik’s usual anti-liberal and buzzword-filled rantings, went unchanged. Only when the article was much, much further down in the NCNow website did it get updated to mention the fact that Stefanik was lying through omission about her role in getting the money. Then, after receiving this letter to the editor, the paper issued another correction: The money came from an Environmental Protection Agency State and Tribal Assistance (EPA STAG) grant, not from a USDA grant. In the correction, Rep. Stefanik is mentioned as having requested the money, with a link included to her request. But this is also misleading: The correction doesn't mention the fact that the Clean Water State Revolving Fund and the Drinking Water State Revolving Fund, from which the EPA STAG grant drew the money, were funded by the Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2023 (136 Stat. 4792, or page 334 of Public Law 117-328) which, of course, Representative Stafanik voted against because it was proposed by Democrats.

The users of Twitter, the dumbest of the social media platforms, performed better journalism than NCNow, and now the paper is twisting itself into a pretzel to avoid pointing out that Stefanik voted against the money that she is now claiming responsibility for providing to Messena.

But how NCNow covers bail reform is even worse.

The recent article “County property used as collateral in fugitive’s release” is just the latest example. A man was arrested on drug charges and used real estate that he did not own to post bail. Somehow, the judge approved his release. NCNow, however, pivoted from the incompetence to smear New York’s bail reform laws some more, even though they were not implicated by the facts of the case at all.  

Unfortunately, this is just the latest in a long trend that, in my opinion, can best be explained as political partisanship. Remember that time last August when there was a manhunt and a police shootout with a fugitive who got convicted for manslaughter but skipped his sentencing hearing? NCNow blamed bail reform law in numerous articles. It quoted prosecutors and police advocates who supported that narrative. No criminal defense lawyer was quoted, though, so no one mentioned how bail reform only applies to pre-trial release, and that this particular fugitive had been released post-trial.

If NCNow is serious in informing the public, rather than misinforming it, it really needs to do better.

Sean Myers
Potsdam