In Jack Brubaker’s “Rail yard” story in Friday’s New Era (Oct. 10), statements by John Fry and Keith Orris were given considerably more coverage than those of Bill Cluck, TRRAAC’s environmental attorney. And F&M was given its customary last word. All this suggests that the story was intentionally slanted toward F&M. But it is possible that these quotes may have unintended consequences.
Fry dismissed TRRAAC’s research with one short sentence, “This is really incompetent”. Also, Fry was quoted as saying that he questions TRRAAC’s “credibility and capability”. He emphasized this point by saying, “Anything in the future that TRRAAC puts out has to be met with immediate skepticism and disbelief.”
Later in the story, regarding a statement by Cluck about F&M’s “cozy” relationship with DEP and PennDOT officials, Fry was quoted as saying, “That is clearly a false accusation.” Fry summarized his position by saying that TRRAAC “should retract everything that was said and apologize to the neighborhood.”
Orris’ statements were as “over the top” as those of Fry. Orris said, “It appears that Mr. Cluck is just making things up as he goes along.” Orris dismissed Cluck’s dump site statements as being “disingenuous and again intentionally misleading”. The final quote of the story was Orris’ saying that Cluck “can’t admit to his wrongdoing.”
Why did Brubaker, a veteran writer for the New Era, use these overblown quotes from Fry and Orris? Could it be that Brubaker may have figured that the reader would be able to see through this hyperbolism, like the little boy in Hans Christian Anderson’s “The Emperor’s New Clothes”? As Abraham Lincoln said, “You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you can not fool all of the people all of the time.”
