| According to Littman, she was told that she was being fired for not disclosing that she had held a "meet-and-greet" for Jim Himes at her house and/or that she had contributed to his campaign. Now the funny thing about that excuse is that she had never been informed that there was such a rule, it doesn't make sense to have such a rule for columnists who are paid to express their opinions and advocate for their partisan beliefs, and moreover, those newspapers had for many years published William F. Buckley, Jr.'s columns, even though Buckley, widely considered "the father of modern conservatism", had given thousands of dollars to Republican candidates and conservative causes every year for decades. No problem.
But of course, Dunster seemed to be looking for a rationale to fire Sarah long before he actually did. In June 2008, about a month before the firing, Dunster spoke to the Greenwich Retired Men's Association in an appearance that was televised on local access television (GCTV). When he was asked by someone in the audience what he was going to do with "that liberal columnist Sarah Littman", he replied first that he personally was "on the conservative side of the spectrum" (great! so much for even pretending to be even-handed and ethical!), then he told the questioner that he intended to make changes in the editorial page to make it more conservative. Sarah's column had been cut back before that and moved from the editorial page to the oped page, which I'm told is a bit of a demotion in itself. So even before Dunster invoked a rule that had never been communicated to any of the columnists, had never been enforced, indeed, about which the management had never even inquired, it looked as though Dunster was looking for just such a pretext.
And of course, it is Dunster who's been behind Greenwich Time's altering the partisan label for Lieberman from "(I-Conn)" to "(D-Conn)" in Associated Press and other articles that refer to Lieberman, while leaving the "I-Conn" label intact in Stamford Advocate in substantially more Democratic Stamford. In my opinion, he knew he'd get more flack from Stamford residents, but figured he'd get away with pissing off Greenwich Democrats because of the numbers. In any event, after several emails to him about the switch, he responded to me in an email on May 21, 2008 that he would check with "his city desk editors about the discrepancy" and get back to me. He never got back to me, in spite of numerous other attempts to contact him. And he and Greenwich Time are still pulling that stunt.
And Dunster never explained why his newspapers, both Greenwich Time and Stamford Advocate, refused to print a single word about Stamford mayor Dan Malloy's press conference the day before the August 2008 Democratic congressional primary at which he said that he could not remain silent any longer about Lee Whitnum, that she was "anti-Semitic" and disturbed and he coudn't remain neutral any longer. Malloy was flanked by three rabbis from Stamford and Fairfield County. GT/Advocate's political reporter Neil Vigdor was there. But once again, Dunster's publications sanitized the coverage of Lee Whitnum and didn't even mention the fact that Mayor Malloy held the press conference until after the election. Not a word.
Our hope that Hearst Newspapers will actually bring in ethical and unbiased management is virtually nil, however. We understand that Bruce Hunter, who was canned and brought back recently will take over. Hunter is the guy who is widely credited with being behind the grotesquely biased treatment of Democrats in Greenwich for so many years.
This time round, however, we won't be giving Hunter and his publications a free pass. That era is over.
There's far more that Dunster pulled |
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