Maine’s Largest Daily’s Recap Of Jesse Jackson’s Visits Total Bust

By Ted Cohen Maine Wire

Try as it might, the shallow, journalism-challenged Portland Press Herald just can't catch a break.

Amid its impotent efforts to actually cover news, it outdid even itself in the category of incompetence.

The paper published an alleged retrospective after political icon and twice-failed presidential contender Jesse Jackson died this week, recapping his memorable Maine campaign visits.

The only problem is that the Jackson campaign appearances the paper mentioned weren't memorable.

They occurred in 1988 in Orono and Portland, when Jackson was running a second time for president. They were unremarkable, forgettable, routine stump speeches.

The state's biggest newspaper also apparently felt a compelling need to mention that Jackson made a 1992 speech in Portland - which was even more forgettable because he wasn't running then for president.

What the Portland Press Herald made absolutely no mention of was Jackson's moving, unexpected 1987 visit to the town of Jay, where a bitter mill-workers strike had idled the local paper mill.

Jackson’s unscheduled voyage to the mill town to support employees of International Paper contained what the Bangor Daily News recalls was a “robust critique of the Reagan administration and corporate power” that boosted the spirits of the striking workers.

The fiery speech “helped propel him to a surprise second-place finish in Maine’s 1988 Democratic presidential caucus,” the Bangor paper said.

Just months after that stemwinder, Jackson won more than a quarter of the vote in the state’s 1988 caucus, shocking political analysts who'd considered him a flash in the pan.

Moreover, Jackson’s 1988 campaign - boosted by the 1987 speech -was instrumental in reforming the party’s nominating process.

The Portland Press Herald’s lack of context and institutional memory is unforgivable, made all the more egregious by the fact that its staffers are the highest-paid journalists in the state of Maine.

If you can call them journalists, that is.

“Superficial, incurious, lazy,” is what one frustrated reader called them.

The superficial, incurious and lazy reporting is one thing, but the stories, if you can call them that, then are overseen before they are published by an executive editor, managing editors, deputy managing editors, news editors, digital producers, a politics editor and copy editors.

And what does the biggest paper in Maine produce?

Pure drivel, with all due respect to drivel.