The online story on Plainfield mayoral candidate Adrian Mapp and his running mate for Assembly, Rick Smiley, has mysteriously disappeared from the PolitickerNJ website.
A search for 'Smiley' turns up the headline in the address bar,
but the requested page is not found.
but the requested page is not found.
This is not the first time a Plainfield story has been taken down from New Jersey's go-to politics website.
An August, 2007 post by the late Wally Edge concerning the ties of Union County public information officer Sebastian D'Elia to the real estate firm designated to handle sales of the condos in Plainfield's new Senior Center building was taken down.
That post also pointed out that D'Elia sat on the board of the Union County Improvement Authority, to which Plainfield had sold the site for $1.
The missing D'Elia post was recovered by a PT reader and re-posted (you can see it here).
So, you should not be surprised that the missing Mapp-Smiley post has also been recovered. You can read the complete text of the story here.
It is curious that in all the years I have been following PolitickerNJ (known as PoliticsNJ before it was bought by Jared Kushner, scion of the powerful New Jersey Democratic family), I have only noticed these two instances of pieces taken down -- both involving Plainfield.
Does some higher power than reporting the facts on the ground have sway at PolitickerNJ?
- PolitickerNJ 4/09/09: "With eye on mayoral line, New Democrats field
Plainfield challenger in LD 22" - Plainfield Today 8/25/07: "PoliticsNJ post by Wally Edge recovered"
-- Dan Damon
Posts
9 comments:
Hi, Dan,
I began reading CLIPS last night after not being able to check email for a couple of days and I clicked on the link and saw that the story was taken down. I was quite surprised because I read Politicker NJ all the time, and there are scores of stories that are kept on the site for weeks. I don't know if this was done on purpose, but you mentioned Kushner, who is closely allied with former Gov. McGreevey. McGreevey, who was mentioned in the article, is very close to Sen. Ray Lesniak. Lesniak and DeFilippo are the ones who control who runs on the line in Plainfield and they are the ones who gave Jerry Green and Linda Stender the line to run in the 22nd district, as well as allowed Jerry Green to run Robinson-Briggs on the line again.
I wouldn't be surprised if they asked PolitickerNJ to take down the story. Why would they want anyone to know that Green and Stender have a Democratic primary opponent in Rick Smiley, for those who want a choice (or antidote to Green/Stender) in June?
I'm glad you saved the story so that everyone can take a look.
Dan, as usual, if there's no real news, you make something up and send out a press release. When its lack of significance is discovered and it's taken down--well, that's more grist for your propaganda mill.
I predict that you'll try to get a lot more mileage out of this non-story. And if you don't like the outcome--well, it's a plot, of course, as it always is when you don't get what you want.
And only 25 minutes went by before you posted your comment as "anonymous". How transparent can you be?
To 8:04 AM --
You are crotchety this morning, maybe you should go back to bed for a while.
To 8:09 am, My name is Lynne and I am a real person, and I posted the first comment. I will not give my last name as I don't want to be harrassed and attacked by people like you. What is especially troubling about this story being taken down, in my view, is that it illustrates that the press might be influenced by powerful politicians and their cronies with money to stifle stories they don't like. We just went through 8 years of this behavior at the national level! To see it possibly happening at the state level is quite serious. I would be equally troubled if it happened in non-political stories as well. For example, if there was a product-safety issue and a powerful company tried to suppress that story so that we couldn't see it if it named executives or politicians who donated to campaigns and so forth.
Thank you, Lynne.
It's an uphill struggle, but worth it in the long run.
Keep up the good work Dan. I, among other, appreciate your effort as well as the efforts of all our bloggers. For those who question your bend, etc.., go start your own blog.
I think that you may be delirious if you really believe that Jerry Green has the juice to get Wally Edge to take down a legitimate story. Jerry is a joke outside of (and sometime inside of) Plainfield. Perhaps Lesniak or Cryan have what it takes to kill a story like this, but PoliticsNJ has written and posted far worse stories about them, so my guess is that they can't get Wally to back off or are too smart to try.
My guess is that your second commenter had it right. You pitched a bad story and they figured it out too late to prevent it from going up, but not too late to take it down.
Wow...8:04AM...is that shoe that same size as the one that's sticking out of Jerry's mouth after going after Maria & the school Super??
To 3:45 PM -- It was indeed taken down at the behest of SOMEONE, as I was able to learn. And not because the story was half-baked. You will never in a thousand years guess WHO! And it wasn't anyone you mention.
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