Withholding Info Can be “Criminally Negligent”

The battle over the proposed eruv Jewish boundary in Westhampton is a national issue since rejection would undercut eruvim nationwide. Officials and media have short-changed residents on information on this issue.

Can news media be “criminally negligent” in not reporting something? We think so. Wikipedia defines that as “careless, inattentive, willfully blind…”

First medium in the docket is the New York Times which has ignored the multi-million dollar, multi-billion word battle since Feb. 4, 2013.

Now that a settlement has been proposed, NYT has assigned real estate reporter Matt Chaban, who recently joined the paper from Crain’s, to write a story.

Chaban contacted us since he has heard that the eruv has become a “matter of some concern for the town, but you especially.”

We noted on odwyerpr.com NYT’s sudden interest in the subject but did not name Chaban. He objected to any mention of the NYT as covering this and now has declined any help from us. A search on odwyerpr.com pulls up about 1,500 entries in the past eight years. So he is cutting himself off from a lot of information.

Map shows eruv around Westhampton Beach.

Promised Town Hall Needed on Eruv

What’s needed on the proposed eruv settlement, exact words of which are not yet available from Mayor Maria Moore, is a “town hall” at which citizens could hear from supporters of both sides and could have access to relevant documents.

Moore, who is unopposed for re-election June 17, has never had a press conference much less a town hall where citizens would be in the driver’s seat. She only appears before the public at trustee meetings where she is surrounded by other trustees with her husband Tom Moore in the audience and Police Chief Trevor Gonce standing by. Citizens get no more than five minutes to speak at the end of the meeting and trustees are not legally required to respond to anything citizens say.

WHB trustees are scheduled to vote on the still-unseen proposed agreement with the East End Eruv Assn. June 2. They should wait until after the election. Planning Board member Steve Frano is running and would replace one of two incumbents, Ralph Urban or Charles Palmer. Frano has yet to say where he stands on the eruv issue.

Why is NYT assigning a newbie staffer to this topic when Nicholas Confessore, a top political reporter, is the son of Quogue library president Lynda Confessore and presumably knows plenty about the eruv situation? NYT can put dozens of reporters on certain stories while neglecting other stories.

We felt the sting of NYT non-coverage in 1995 when the O’Dwyer Co. won a lawsuit against Dean Rotbart’s TJFR publishing company that had sued the company for $21 million on charges of false reporting about his “Newsroom Confidential” series.

NYT had been so excited about our coverage of what Rotbart said to the 1993 PR Society of America conference that it sent a photographer to his home to take a picture to illustrate a story by Bill Glaberson that ran across six columns on Dec. 27, 1993. The story falsely accused this writer of “slipping into” the Rotbart talk (it was open to the press), of printing a transcript, which we did not, and falsely described TJFR as a “rival” and “arch enemy” of the O’Dwyer Co. when the two firms competed in only a narrow area.

When we won the suit, obtaining the top position in the New York Law Journal that day, NYT ignored it. American Journalism Review, Deadline Club, Business Wire and others hailed our victory but not NYT.

SH Press Could Do a Lot More

The Southampton Press/27east.com has written many stories about the eruv battle but it could do a lot more.

Specifically, both SH Press and the WHB website should carry the 34-page examination of the Constitutional issues involved in eruvim by Prof. Alexandra Susman of the UCLA Law School and the 18 pages of equally compelling text declaring eruvim unconstitutional by law Prof. Marci Hamilton of Yeshiva University.

A link to that text is in the Aug. 17, 2015 report that Mayor Moore, responding to 25 minutes of complaints by residents that there was a failure of WHB officials to communicate about the eruv, had proposed a “community meeting” on the subject. It never happened.

We have plenty of other documents on eruvim (1,500+ on odwyerpr.com) but neither the NYT, SH Press or local libraries are interested. There isn’t one speck of materials about the eruv situation in the Westhampton library.

SH Press, in an editorial July 23, 2015, expressed support for eruvim, saying, “Nobody can see the lechis that reportedly mark the boundaries of an eruv…” It urged acceptance of the “roof” of an eruv although an eruv is supposed to be a “wall.”

SH Press, buying into court decisions that are also blind to eruvim depictions on Synagogue websites, said lechis are “not signs if they are not visible.”