Well, they say it's better to be talked about than not, so I suppose we should be flattered by the epic thread on KnoxBlab devoted to our coverage of the June 30 candidates' forum at the Knoxville Expo Center. As you may recall, Metro Pulse reporter extraordinaire Cari Wade Gervin attended the hours-long gab-a-thon, which featured candidates for City Council, Knoxville mayor, and the 6th District state Senate seat. She live-Tweeted the thing (despite having a broken finger from a kickball injury -- hey, H.L. Mencken never had to do that) and then wrote three long blog posts -- here, here, and here -- that constituted the most comprehensive coverage of the forum by any media in town, even if we do say so ourselves.
So what's the problem? Well, the "cover up" alleged in the title of the KnoxBlab thread revolves around the fact that we did not publish those blog posts in the next week's print edition. That's right: Because we decided week-old blog posts were not worth reprinting in their entirety, we are involved in some kind of complicated collusion involving Madeline Rogero, Mark Padgett, Joe Hultquist and -- try to keep up, here -- the editorial board of the News Sentinel. (One might think that the best way to actually cover up information would be to not report it at all. But apparently we are too fiendishly clever for that.) Anyway, the thread was started by a character known on KnoxBlab as #9, familiar to frequenters of the knoxnews comment boards as Jack_McLeroy and probably some other pseudonyms besides. He's the most notorious Internet troll in town, having been banned and bounced from multiple boards under multiple names, and has spent the past decade or so relentlessly propounding conspiracy theories of one kind or another, all involving the local media and ranging from the Candy Factory to the Ten-Year Plan. KnoxBlab regulars (myself included) know better than to engage with him, but frankly sometimes we can't help ourselves. The resulting trainwreck of a thread features appearances by myself, News Sentinel editorial page editor Scott Barker, a member of the Metropolitan Planning Commission, a few News Sentinel and Metro Pulse columnists, and eventually the redoubtable Ms. Gervin herself. It is not really recommended reading -- nothing particularly good or useful comes of it -- but as an artifact of local political and digital culture circa 2011, it is possibly of some anthropological interest.
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