Atomictumor

Right, so the story goes that something like last year a kindergarten teacher in town was fired for insubordination amidst allegations of being vaguely rough on students.

It was ugly, and, as with everything that happens in Oak Ridge, first theres a bunch of people yelling and hollering, and then theres vague allegations in the letters to the editors and opinion pages of the local newspapers that the superintendent is covering things up, and that its all a big conspiracy, and so on, and so forth.

Which you can expect from Oak Ridge. I mean, seriously, a good portion of the local internet community is composed of crackpots. Freaky, babbling, aggressive weirdos.

I digress, and haven’t hit the point yet. So last fall she was fired, and a hearing was scheduled. The hearing started yesterday, and first thing that happens is that the public, including the Oak Ridger reporters, were booted from the building.

And this is where the story gets weird. Because today, the Oak Ridger published an unsigned opinion piece that sounds every bit as disjointed and insane as the freaks that populate its forum page.

Take a sec to read this bad boy. Better yet, I’ll hit some of the high points of the journalistic masterpiece entitled “Get the Hell Out”:

First, it’s the student newspaper scandal that gave Oak Ridge a black eye that stretched across the nation; then it’s playing Russian roulette with the lives of our students in what appears to be a pissing contest with city officials during budget time; and now it’s closing a public meeting at the last minute and telling everyone to get the hell out of the proceedings.

They seem to take a large affront to the fact that school board members, additionally, were not present at the meeting.

And who is the most to blame? Why our vote would go to our old friends serving on the Oak Ridge School Board, of course.

“What?” You may say.

“Ridiculous!” You may opine.

“Why the members of the School Board did not even attend the now-it’s-open-to-the-public and now-it’s-not formal hearing of the allegedly insubordinate and inappropriate Brenda Fellner!”

Exactly.

The School Board members were no where to be seen during Thursday’s morning’s closing of what had been anticipated for months as a public meeting — until a group of Nashville attorneys representing various interests decided to boot the press and the public from proceedings.

Wow.

Thats some vitriol.

The piece then goes on to presume that school board members were in a super secret agreement not to spend their day at a hearing, which involves them in a similar way as it involves the Mayor, the Senator, and the President (maybe the Pope), being that the issue is between a boss (the superintendent) and his employee (the teacher).

Makes sense to me.

And probably to ol Rick Esposito, except I’m starting to really think that theres a vested interest on the part of the Oak Ridger to sensationalize and blow up anything here in town, maybe because they’re tired of trying to compete on just reporting news, or maybe because they wish they were in Knoxville where dirty pool does play on the school board. Last week they blew up a tiff between a county judge and county commissioner into a massive thing (as seen, currently, on their Poll section).

Then theres the fiasco thats been ongoing up until recently with the “user comments” on the bottom of each news article, where each article gets copied up with inane, crazy stupid comments at the bottom, saying something like

I AGRE WITH THE DOGGUY, THE POLICE ARE TRYING TO KEEP US FROM SMOKING IN OUR HOUSES. I HAD THREE SURGERYES LAST YR AND EACH TIME THEREE WAS SICK PEOPLE THERE, AND THEY ALL VOTED FOR OBAMA.

REMEMBER only one time THE SUNSHINE IS ON THE BACKSIDE, AND THE little kids GET IN THE AY!@

Seriously. I kid you not.

I could speculate on the reasons for the Oak Ridger going this direction, from the non-local ownership and editorial oversight, to the local newspaper competition, to the recent purchase of the paper, but I don’t know that it’d make a difference.

It is, however, very disheartening to those of us who are able to function objectively and not see black helicopters on the skyline, who know people working for the city council and the school system, who worked hard to keep buses going while understanding the financial need to have cut them back. The Oak Ridger may not be the best part of Oak Ridge, but it is a part, and one that is every bit as blighted as the apartments in Highland View.

Unfortunately, eminent domain doesn’t apply.

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To cap this up, the above makes it my distinct and proud honor to bestow upon the Oak Ridger the Atomictumor.com William Randolph Hearst Yellow Journalism award for 2008! Thanks for the hard work, Oak Ridger!

This entry was posted on Friday, February 8th, 2008 at 2:27 pm and is filed under Rambling. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.