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BGonline.org Forums
Why has no one posted this?
Posted By: Daniel Murphy In Response To: Why has no one posted this? (Chuck Bower)
Date: Monday, 12 April 2010, at 8:49 p.m.
Chuck, I don't disagree with anything you've written in this thread, or your having posted the link to the story. But your thread title seemed a bit accusative. Did you think someone else knew before you did and should have scooped you in this forum? If so why not just say so? Or instead why not publish the link without the build-up?
I rarely read the New York Post and until yesterday had only the slightest knowledge of Rod Covlin as an ABT player, occasional BGO poster, and USBGF president and chairman. No one informed me when his estranged wife died last New Year's Eve, and I had been completely unaware that she had since been exhumed and autopsied and that cause of death was now believed to have been strangulation or "neck compression" -- stripped of the Post's sensationalism, that much of the story seems factual. And now having been so informed, I suppose that insofar as the USBGF is relevant to the backgammon community, so is Covlin's personal situation as an officer of the USBGF.
Should the private lives of backgammon personalities be kept private?
Shouldn't everyone's privacy be respected, generally, unless aspects of those private lives are relevant to some public right or need to know?
Is information in the New York Post reliable?
Well, it's not the World Nut Daily but the Post is owned by Rupert Murdoch's News Corp and is crap of the sort that gives "tabloid" a bad name (New York Newsday and the New York Daily News managed -- when I lived in New York -- to be, respectively, excellent and decent papers although in tabloid format). The Post doesn't even try. In 2005, Business Week attributed the paper's then 6-year-long rise in circulation (a rise long since relost) to its editor "who cut story lengths, doubled story counts, devoted more space to photos (especially color ones), and upped the Post's daily quota of sex, celebrity, and scandal." That sounds about right.
These are tough times for newspapers throughout the U.S., and the Post doesn't reveal how much money it loses, but it has reportedly never shown a profit since Murdoch bought the paper in 1976. It's been estimated to have lost tens of millions annually. Circulation at the Post fell about 19% in 2009 from the previous year. Now ... how did "one of the most agenda-driven, biased, propaganda rags imaginable" enter the conversation? Oh yes, Rich had mentioned that the story had not yet appeared in the New York Times. Well, it still hasn't. But for what it's worth, circulation at the hyperbolically demonized Times also dropped last year, by about 7%, but the Times corporation actually managed to show a sizable operating profit -- as did Murdoch's News Corp, thanks to some very nonnewspaperish profit centers, including Avatar.
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