We haven’t had much to say about Chron columnist Rick Casey lately because his columns usually speak well enough on their own (that’s not meant as a compliment).
From time to time, though, it’s useful to point out the sort of nasty spin that Casey regularly puts in his columns, a spin that is frequently consistent with Chron editorial board positions.
Take his March 5 column on a case involving a Travis County coroner who, when presented with the charred remains of a corpse the size of a baby that authorities told him was believed to be of a 23 year old man, ruled that the charred remains were not inconsistent with that belief. The Austin American-Statesman story, which Casey had the courtesy to cite, reveals those details:
Dr. Vladimir Parungao, who has since retired from Bayardo’s office, examined the remains under the impression that it was a 23-year-old male. He even noted in the autopsy that some charred tissue could have been male genitalia.
Now, as the case has developed, it appears the man faked his death, substituting the corpse of an elderly woman for what was presumably his own. Casey excitedly takes the opportunity to point out that a female would not have a penis several times in his column while ridiculing Dr. Parungao, and then goes on to make the leap that this sort of shabby (in his view) forensic science permeates the entire forensic science community in Texas — a community of “professional testifiers” as he puts it. Of course, calling into question all forensic science is perfectly consistent with the newspaper’s anti-death-penalty stance, and it’s convenient that Casey couldn’t find Dr. Parungao for comment even though the Austin newspaper could (and Austin’s WXAN managed to speak to the chief medical examiner about the case).
In a March 9 column, Casey laments what he apparently feels is the low pay of unskilled workers in the state of Texas, and goes on to relay this anecdote:
Last year, HISD countered to an extent. In 2004, HISD saw a much larger number of lower-income employees drop their insurance. An important reason was that HISD encouraged them to.
We pay many of the people who serve our children so little that they qualified for the state’s Children’s Health Insurance Program, or CHIP. So school district officials gave workshops and presentations showing eligible workers with families that they would get a better deal with CHIP than with the private insurance company.
This saved the district money, as well, and helped account for a tripling of waivers of health insurance over the previous year.
Then the state cut CHIP eligibility, leaving many of those school workers and others out in the cold.
Reasonable people may well find it outrageous that a government employer would encourage its workers to take advantage of government welfare programs (if indeed HISD did so — the Chronicle‘s misreporting on HISD has been a problem in the past) instead of providing affordable benefits, but that’s not Casey’s spin. Instead, Casey’s spin is to blast away at those mean legislators in Austin who just happen to be Republicans (which Casey does not say, but he doesn’t really need to). That’s consistent with the Chron news/editorial position (is there a difference to the newspaper?) advanced frequently by Clay Robison.
On March 11, Casey turned his attention to the local instance of an attempt by St. Luke’s Hospital to engage in an act of euthanasia against the wishes of the family of one Spiro Nikolouzos. Casey points out that the law allowing the hospital to engage in this act was enacted with the input of the National Right to Life organization, thereby leaving readers to conclude that somehow that group either endorses this attempt at euthanasia or is hypocritical. Of course, the Chronicle editorial board’s pro-abortion position frequently finds the newspaper at odds with the National Right to Life organization, and Casey’s column praising this law resembles a ghastly pro-death editorial that we’ve previously criticized.
And finally, there’s today’s column on the recent TRMPAC trial, in which Casey refers to an “alleged Great Election Robbery by the infamous DeLay Gang.” It’s good that he used that “alleged” in the column, because we could hardly sense the disdain he has for Tom DeLay and Republicans otherwise — a disdain that frequently seems to show up on the Chronicle editorial page as well.
Certainly the Chronicle can take any position it would like on any number of issues, and Jeff Cohen’s star columnist Rick Casey can parrot those positions and use his column in the metro/state section to advance that agenda. However, the newspaper shouldn’t be surprised when critical readers find the lack of balance — not to mention the simply nasty spin Casey puts on so many issues — to be off putting, especially in a metro area in which more than half of the registered voters likely do not accept the Chronicle‘s editorial position in the first place. And it’s not at all clear why his noxious editorializing doesn’t run on the editorial page.
