Let me say first that I am not voting for Ron Paul but I resent the PR articles that have been coming out over the last 6 months or so attempting to say that the NASCO/NAFTA Superhighway that runs from the western side of Mexico up to Canada is some kind of myth only believed by some yahoos. Here's just ONE of the articles I have commented on, on this site (go click the keyword NAFTA below to read more). If I WAS going to vote Republican, I'd probably vote for Ron Paul, so it was interesting to see this comment about the writer of that hit piece.
In her article entitled "Highway to Hell? Ron Paul's worked up about U.S. sovereignty," reporter Gretel C. Kovach homed-in on and held up to ridicule recent comments by the Republican presidential candidate and Texas congressman at the CNN-YouTube debate about the "conspiracy of ideas" to surrender America's sovereignty, a significant step toward which would be the construction of the highly controversial, highly publicized NAFTA Superhighway.
"Only it's not 1," Kovach wrote.
She then commenced to explain that, "like all good conspiracies," the hubbub surrounding the NAFTA Superhighway is "a strange stew of fact and fiction fired by paranoia," listing off a handful of circumstances she deems worthy of the "fact" category comprising said stew.
Except, as Ken Sellers, vice president of the local Oklahomans for Sovereignty and Free Enterprise (OK-SAFE) pointed out to UTW after reading the article, "Gretel Kovach gives no evidence to support her 'only it isn't 1' statement."
Sellers' group is a statewide grassroots organization concerned with, as the name indicates, opposing any threats to the nation's sovereignty and free exercise of capitalism.
State Sen. Randy Brogdon, R-Owasso, noticed the same glaring lack of supporting evidence for her statement, so he attempted to contact her.
"If you'd like to hear both sides of the story, I'd be happy to visit with you," he said in a voicemail message after he'd obtained the journalist's cell phone number.
At the time of this writing, Kovach hadn't responded, he said.
"It's difficult for me to understand how a so-called investigative journalist would pay no attention to the facts," Brogdon said.
"She laid out a very fluff article--there's nothing to back it, no details or facts to support it," he added.
Here's what I thought was odd.I looked up this person and she is all over the map- some kind of free-lance journalist that writes for EVERYBODY and quite often is teamed with some other writer. She apparently had worked for the Dallas Morning News but when the DMN (which paper, at least online really sucks) decided that journalism was dead and offered a buyout, she took it.
Gretel Kovach, thirty-one, joined the paper in 2003 and served as an embedded reporter in Iraq. The circulation scandal, the layoffs, and the bureau closings convinced her to take the buyout. "Even in just three years, The Dallas Morning News had changed so drastically that it was almost unrecognizable," says Kovach, who still freelances for the paper.
Does she freelance as well for other papers or magazines, including Newsweek?
I'm guessing that on that one, she took one of the PR pieces that was sent out (probably by NASCO in an attempt to lull people into thinking a huge highway splitting this country is a myth) and wrote it into an article WITHOUT DOING ANY INVESTIGATIVE JOURNALISM. She's the one whose credibility has been hurt by this and I'd sure like to know if she really works as an employee for the NyTimes, Newsweek, etc or she is a contractor/freelancer for them.
