The OC Blog Back Issues Our Mission Contact Us Masthead
Sudsy Wants You to Join the Oregon Commentator
 

If Facts Have a Liberal Bias, Does That Make Kera Abraham a Monarchist?

There’s a pretty funny letter in the Eugene Weekly today from one James Johnston. Johnston, who participated in the 1995 campaign to prevent logging at Warner Creek, took issue with EW Reporter Kera Abraham‘s previous article. I’ll let him give the details:

Kera Abraham’s article (11/2) about the Warner Creek campaign was the worst piece of reporting I’ve ever read. For the record, absolutely nothing that was reported about me is accurate. There was never any such thing as a “Monty Python Forest Engineering Division.” I didn’t build the fort. Abraham got my age wrong, my past job wrong, my current job wrong — she got literally every single detail about me wrong.

The vast majority of facts as reported in this story, including dates, times, and who did what, where, when are similarly just plain wrong.

I was proud to play a minor role in the Warner Creek campaign. Everyone involved took full responsibility for committing misdemeanors — including physically affixing ourselves to a logging road. It was a very conscientiously crafted response to a timber sale that could only be sold because Congress had suspended all environmental laws.

Warner Creek had absolutely nothing to do with orgies, arson plots, or hairy armpits. The Warner Creek campaign was made up of a group of smart, serious and strategic people taking radical but carefully measured action against a government that thought it could break its own rules and get away with it.

And no, I never “made love, as free wild creatures do” at Warner Creek. For one thing, it was cold as hell most of the time and I wouldn’t have taken off my clothes for sex or money.

I have been a working locally on forest issues as a volunteer and paid professional for almost 15 years. Most of the people reading this probably know me as a guy who knows what the hell I’m talking about. Anyone interested in Warner Creek should know that Abraham’s characterization of the people and events of that time are flat wrong. After communicating with her at length about her piece and her sources, I am convinced that she is an extremely sloppy reporter who relied on other peoples’ reporting for a third of her story, second-hand gossip for another third of the story, and simply made up the remainder.

[My emphasis]

To be fair to Abraham, Johnston was probably pretty high he was making sweet, sweet beastial love and just can’t remember.

But wild animal sex aside, how many factual errors in the story does EW fess up to? Meh, only six or seven.

  1. T says:

    I thought James’ letter was the highlight of that issue. Kudos, sir.

  2. James Johnston says:

    Hey screwballs,

    Been way too long since I last I had Max’s beer call with the OC staff. But then again, you all don’t seem nearly as smart or as funny as the guys I used to know. But the decline of the Eugene Weekly… you may actually be on to something here.

    Ta, ta,

    James

  3. Niedermeyer says:

    Let’s not lose sight of the fact that the Weakly comes out looking bad in this one too… Abraham was their “local journalist of the year” just a few issues ago.

  4. T says:

    It’s sort of cliched to say it at this point, but our J-school is wildly overrated.

  5. Sho says:

    You’d think that with a MA from the UO Journalism school, Abraham would at least be able to get the easiest-to-confirm facts correct such as someone’s age. Then again, the J-school doesn’t require students to take math classes so I guess I can’t blame her. I weep for the declining value of my degree.

Sorry, the comment form is closed at this time.