Is the Standard Examiner Engaged in a Pre-Election Crime Story Blackout?

Check out our companion article; and read about an opportunity to win FREE PIZZA RUNNER PIZZA

It's another Emerald City slow news day, so we're going to do a back-burner cleanup, and highlight a few things that have been sitting in our outbox for the past few days, along with some current news:

First, we'll follow up on Sunday night's crime story, wherein another Emerald City citizen was reportedly gunned down on the mean streets of Central Ogden, an area of town that's recently seen more gunplay than Tombstone, Arizona in the days of Wyatt Earp.

This story first came to our attention through the efforts of one of our gentle readers, who spotted this Salt Lake Tribune article, which appeared both in yesterday's SLTrib hard-copy and web editions. The Standard-Examiner's non-reporting of this story raised some speculation amongst our gentle readers in yesterday's lower article thread, as to whether the Std-Ex might be conducting a crime reporting blackout, in order to avoid embarrassing our Crime-fighting mayor, during the final month of his 2007 re-election bid.

Happily for the otherwise sodden credibility if the local newspaper, the story is reported in this morning's Std-Ex edition, albeit in a form that might be overlooked, except by those voracious Std-Ex readers like us.

Here's the story, buried in today's "Top of Utah" section sidebar. Curiously however, this morning's Std-Ex report is actually a regurgitated version of the story that went out yesterday on the AP wire service. We find it interesting that the Std-Ex still hasn't dispatched a reporter to do an investigation. Many of us are still scratching their heads, wondering why the victim isn't talking about the incident.

To the Standard-Examiner's credit however, the same sidebar section also contains a brief report of a Monday night armed robbery at Smith's Food and Drug Pharmacy, wherein the perpetrator is described as a man, believed to be in his twenties, wearing, among other things, sunglasses and a black hooded sweatshirt.

Having read this, we couldn't help but make the connection with this ABC-4 News story, reporting a Saturday afternoon Emerald City jewelry store robbery and shootout, involving a perpetrator of a similar description. We don't believe this story was ever reported in the Standard-Examiner, so we thank the intrepid Salt Lake City TeeVee News station for the heads-up. We're still wondering why the Std-ex failed to report this.

And speaking of unreported crime news, we hunted this morning's Std-Ex edition in vain for anything on last night's Ogden High School neighborhood meeting, where the topic of discussion was supposed to be gangs, crime and such. We've given this morning's Std-Ex edition careful scrutiny, and we can find nary a word about it.

Fortunately we have a few brief notes from Gentle Reader Bill C., who attended the event, and lodged these comments in last night's comments section. In this connection we hope we'll get more information from others who attended this event. If all goes well, we can flesh out this story right here on Weber County Forum, and offer the lumpencitizens of Emerald City something quite a bit more robust than the Standard-Examiner has provided -- which is exactly zero, zilch and nada.

And switching topics entirely, we'll belatedly spotlight an ongoing contest, happening at one of our favorite websites, Grift Ogden. If any of our gentle readers are of an artistic bent, this contest offers an ideal opportunity for free pizza products at our very most favorite pizzeria, Pizza Runner.

That's it is folks; short and sweet.

And specifically, we'd like to hear our gentle readers' opinions on this: Is the Std-Ex engaging in a crime story-reporting blackout?

And how bout a little more information on last night's community meeting?

Don't let the cat get yer tongues.

Update 10/9/07 9:35 a.m. MT: About ten minutes before we completed today's article, Gentle Curmudgeon sent us this excellent front page quality piece. Dang! Had we been aware that Curmudgeon was composing such an article, we could have slept in for an extra hour this morning. Although there's a slight overlap with our own article that appears above, and our article concentrates on STD-EX reporting lapses, Curmudgeon's is more broad in scope, and highlights several of today's general news stories which we'd omitted. Consider it today's companion article -- just a little something extra to chew on this morning.

Update 10/10/07 9:30 a.m. MT: Gentle Reader Andy informs us that today's Std-Ex edition contains a full report on Monday night's "crime and gangs" neighborhood meeting, which story was delayed due to Std-Ex publication deadlines. Our gentle readers can view this story here.