A funny thing happened on the way to the Progress.

The Charlottesville Daily Progress has picked up on the MZM/Rep. Virgil Goode story, but in a curiously (I daresay suspiciously) truncated way.

Peter Hardin wrote a solid piece for today’s Richmond Times-Dispatch, outlining the MZM scandal and Goode’s role in it, such as it is. (Both the Times-Dispatch and the Daily Progress are owned by Media General, so the Progress carried the story, too.) The key grafs:

During the 2003-2004 election period, MZM ranked as the largest contributor to Goode’s re-election campaign with $48,551 in donations, according to the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics.

The company next in line gave $12,750, according to the politics center, which totals contributions by political action committees, company employees and their immediate family members. Goode’s campaign raised a total of $818,460 in the 2003-2004 period.

[…]

In the current, 2005-2006 election period, MZM-linked donations top the list of Goode’s campaign receipts at $38,625, according to the center.

Goode was asked if there was a relationship between the campaign donations and his working to help MZM expand in his district.

“My efforts to help them out have been based on the fact I think they do a good job,” Goode said. “I was very impressed when I visited the Charlottesville facility.” His efforts also were based, he said, “on the fact of bringing jobs to the 5th District.”

Good on Peter Hardin, right? He outlines the scandal, looks at where it points to Goode (though he fails to mention that former MZM employees said that Goode needs to be investigated for his role in this), backs it up with the facts, and gets a quote from Goode. It’s a bit of a scoop, actually, since it marks the first time that Goode’s said anything other than “no comment.”

The story on the Progress website is the same — they’ve just taken the RT-D article and syndicated it. But the story in the newspaper itself? Something seems to have happened on the way to the press.

The Daily Progress has the piece on their front page, below the fold: “MZM under federal scrutiny,” with a picture of Virgil Goode. Oddly, though, it’s truncated. All references to Goode receiving contributions from MZM are gone. The last fourteen paragraphs of the article — the entirety of the piece about the relationship between Goode and MZM — have been removed.

Now, I know just enough about journalism to understand that the pyramid format is used for a reason — stories are designed to be able to be cut off for space reasons. So perhaps those fourteen paragraphs are missing because Hardin’s piece was longer than the Progress‘s space allowed, and they didn’t have the ability or the willingness to edit the story to put the most important bits in there. (After all, it’s a Charlottesville paper that, due to the edits, is featuring a front-page story about a California congressman engaging in likely-illegal behavior with a Washington, D.C. company, with an apparently-random photo of Virgil Goode. Without the Goode bits, it’s lost nearly all local relevance.)

On the other hand, it’s possible that this edit was done for less savory reasons. The Progress did, after all, endorse Bush in 2000 and again in 2004, despite batting .000 with their first endorsement. Media General is an extremely conservative company. The possibility of shenanigans certainly exists.

That said, it’s my understanding of the Progress that the line between their editorial board and their staff is a bright one. I’ve never had a Progress reporter tell me that they were ever pressured to make any changes to any stories for political or business reasons.

But, if nothing else, it certainly looks bad. At a bare minimum, it’s a strange thing to do, turning a Charlottesville-centric article into one that’s not even internally consistent.

Cheers on Peter Hardin for an interesting, balanced piece about MZM and Rep. Virgil Goode. Jeers to the Daily Progress for butchering it.

Published by Waldo Jaquith

Waldo Jaquith (JAKE-with) is an open government technologist who lives near Char­lottes­­ville, VA, USA. more »