It's a shame that Madison does not have a blogger journalist of the caliber of Jonathan Maus, in Portland, Oregon, who specializes in bike community news. At http://BikePortland.org, you can be sure that news will be dissected and analyzed from a bicyclist point of view, and that a bike accident will not automatically be blamed on the bicyclist. Jonathan Maus in effect acts a a freelance reporter for the Portland metropolitan area.

The Capital Times article did nothing but present the driver's point of view, as given by a police department spokesperson. The Capital Times does not send a reporter to the scene. It is a tiny newspaper that is a complete anachronism. It has fewer than 30,000 readers, and has survived for the last 50 years only because its founder, William T. Evjue, made a an agreement with the dominant newspaper in the market that the two newspapers would share profits equally, and in exchange, the Capital Times would remain an afternoon paper and not switch to morning or publish a Sunday edition.

This monopoly power sharing agreement was supported by local liberal politicians and unions, as an exception from the Sherman Anti-trust Act, and sanctioned by Congress. Eventually, all other afternoon papers in other markets in the USA went out of business or shifted to morning publication. Over the years, the dominant paper in the Madison market, published jointly with the Capital Times, gradually took over the entire market, becoming more liberal in the process to fit the demands of Madison. For years, the Capital Times was a strange anomaly, in that it had more news reporters and editorial staff than its circulation could possibly justify. But at some point, the original editorial fervor disappeared, the third generation of the Evjue family died off, and the Capital Times became what it is today, an empty shell. It has practically no news staff and most of what it publishes are wire service and police reports or press releases.

This article is itself an example of the kind of news the Capital Times can afford to publish. It is simply a police report, in which the reporter was never at the scene of the accident, and got all his news from a single source, the Madison Police Department spokesperson, who of course, has simply presented the driver's point of view.

Howard