The lesson here is that subtlety doesn't play in the blog-cosmos. The lesson (which I've known after years of doing this, but sometimes forget) comes from a link (always welcome even if it's made for all the wrong reasons) to a story in Qnews.
This is the Qnews story: Cops nab nine in major tea-room sex-sting; Paper prints pictures; Chief scared
This is an uncommon story for Qnews because there is no source link to a news site on the first line. Instead, it says "Source: seaQwa Qnews from media reports". Subtle distinction, but what it means is that I wrote at least a major part of the story. It is not, like most items in Qnews, a simple digest of someone else's story.
The reason I did that on this story is because I thought the original newspaper's story was outrageous and wholly inappropriate. Qnews isn't a place for me to say that, but I had hoped it would be obvious to readers that the coverage by Daytona Beach News-Journal was over-the-top.
My lede, which is completely different than the lede in the News-Journal is:
Daytona Beach News-Journal on Friday printed photographs and names of nine men arrested on misdemeanor charges by a large police team that ran a sting to find men who were coughing, sneezing, and tapping their feet in a local mall restroom.
Although I'll admit the three-part headline didn't do a good job of conveying this, my lede is not about the arrests. It is about the paper's decision to print the pictures of men the arrested for misdemeanors. The secondary lede is about the size of the police force used to effect the nine petty arrests.
The incredibly homophobic comments of the Daytona Beach police chief are quoted extensively.
I did my best within constraints of a news story to convey the utter ridiculousness of the arrests themselves and of the paper's coverage of the arrests.
But a blogger whose name, I assume, is "Mike" since his blog is called "Mike says" chooses to link to that Qnews story in order to make a point that has little to do with that particular story. What apparently worries Mike is that the I didn't mention that the minor local politician arrested in the tea-room sting is a Democrat.
Mike thinks this is a naughty thing and -- I suppose some sort of sign of liberal bias. Maybe it is. But I didn't see the affiliation in the News-Journal story. That doesn't surprise me because I come from a place where local races are non-partisan. Maybe it was there, but I wasn't looking for it.
While the original story in the News-Journal goes on at length about the tea-room 9, giving personal details as well as names and photographs, all that the Qnews story says about them is this:
A former Daytona Beach city commissioner and a local high school teacher were among those arrested in the sting and pictured in the paper. The teacher resigned, after posting $1000 bail.
I didn't mention the name of the arrested politician or teacher or the names of any of the other men arrested because I think it was inappropriate for the original story to mention those names and print their pictures. I doubt that they often print front-page stories on misdemeanor arrests, or that they print the names and pictures of the scofflaws when they do such stories.
That was the too-subtle point of the story and the reason it was framed as it was.
Mike the blogger is also upset about this 'graph in the story:
Snaring a minor local politician in the sting echoes the scandal involving Sen. Larry Craig, R-Idaho, who was arrested at a Minnesota airport restroom in June after investigators said he made suggestive signals to an undercover cop in an adjoining stall.
That's almost a direct quotation from the News-Journal except that they included the name of the "minor local politician". The reference to Craig does use the party designation, but that is the common way of identifying members of Congress and (here, at least) the state legislature.
And yes, I could have left it out. (It was, in fact, a late addition to the story along with the next graph about reader response to the News-Journal story.)
I don't mind that he linked to the Qnews post even if Mike grossly misinterprets the story in order to make a silly point, but he could have found several posts including gaynews.blogspot.com that hewed more closely to the homophobic News-Journal coverage of the arrests and that included the name of the minor local politician who was caught up in the arrest.
Oh, and Mike doesn't seem to think much of Qnews in general, since he uses scare quotes when he calls it 'a gay-theme “news” site'.
No Mike, you may not be jaded, but you read like most of us on the web and miss the point in cases like this because of it.
(I tried to comment about this on Mike's blog, but the software he uses to run it -- Wordpress -- would not accept my new registration.)