What are the standards for the Victoria Advocate?

This is a follow-up to my coverage of the shameful behavior of the Victoria Advocate’s relatively new owner, Carpenter Media Group, dealing with properties in Alaska.

There is more to the Alaska saga. Not only has the story of these brave journalists gone viral and international, but the Alaska Press Club has sided with the reporters and editors who stood for real journalism ethics. The press club’s Oct. 13, 2025 statement minced no words, calling out CMG for violating “ethical journalism standards.”

The statement, and some of the news coverage, noted that the CMG bosses rationalized their interference by claiming the story failed to meet its standards. And that brings us to our local CMG-owned newspaper. The lead story on the front page announced that DeTar Health System will have a new chief executive soon. The story left out why the previous CEO left, a tidbit that’s important for the context. Readers should have been reminded that Bernard Leger left to semi-retire in his home state of Louisiana. That would have made it clear Leger jumped and wasn’t pushed and no cloud of possible shame covered his departure.

So, with a bit of irony, let’s evaluate the Victoria Advocate’s standards. If you look at the third paragraph of the story, it’s lifted word-for-word from DeTar’s news release.

Same for the last paragraph of the Advocate’s story.

Reading those two paragraphs in the Advocate gives the clear impression that the reporter talked to Dr. Stevens and Brett Maxfield. But did she? The Advocate has shamelessly published content from others in the community and properly gave the authors a byline. So, why not just run in the news release that way as the paper has done for others? Or, what would have the shame been to publish the news release with the standard attribution of “staff report?”

I have to wonder why the cub reporter wasn’t given the guidance to call DeTar and/or Dr. Stevens to go a little deeper. Or to ask Maxfield if he’s led at a teaching hospital and what insights he might have to bring to Victoria. She could even have been guided to properly add to the attribution “in a news release,” which would have absolved her of appropriating the copy as her own; or, if a competent editor might have made the same modification while explaining the reason for doing so. Instead, I am left to wonder what the Advocate’s or CMG’s journalistic standards are now that not only accept as poor journalism, but also would put a cub reporter’s reputation at risk like this because this is plagiarism.

I’d like us all to keep in mind what the Alaska Press Club wrote in the penultimate paragraph of its statement, “We should not accept these actions by Carpenter Media as normal. They threaten the ability of journalists to serve as watchdogs for our communities.”

Victoria Advocate has lost its journalistic soul

I few weeks ago, I predicted that the Carpenter Media Group would let the I-am-a-Christian fundamentalist managing editor turn the Victoria Advocate into a right-wing Christian propaganda sheet. And, that the news content would be fluff and non-controversial content. I looks like that’s exactly what has happened.

The weekend edition has Mark Ward’s story about Jesus’ occupation — note, please the incorrect form of possesive for words ending is “s.” The lovely photo accompanying the column depicts Jesus as clearly a white man. Is that surprising? I guess not given the fundy-Christian view that white people are the only ones who count. Next we have Doug Stringer’s long-long story on the Holy Spirit. Then we have two local pastors providing us with musings in their regular columns: Andrew Schroer and Michael Graff of the Graff family’s business also known as Faith Family Church.

I want to remind y’all that the managing editor touted his membership Faith Family Church right out of the box last year. And, it’s the home of one of Michael Cloud, our congressman and the Freedom Caucus puppet who takes his orders from the oligarch machine. Here’s what’s important to understand now. CMG, based in Tuscaloosa, Ala., tipped its hand as Trumpers with the betrayal of journalistic ethics, standards and common courtesy by selling out to a right-wing, two-bit Alaska state legislator. I covered this in my Oct. 3 blog post, but the legislator’s problem was that its coverage of a memorial for the murdered Charlie Kirk wasn’t fawning enough. You see, the Alaska reporter accurately described Kirk as a “Christian Nationalist icon.” When CMG pulled the story, rewrote it without talking to the reporter and editors and then republished it, the ethical and brave journalists resigned in protest.

As for the other content, I’ll use this past Friday’s story on the League of Women Voters  to illustrate how the Advocate has given up any pretense of newswriting or evidence that an editor processes copy before publication. Or, maybe the editor did look at the copy but missed some basic issues. One example is the caption on the photograph with Friday’s story about the League of Women Voters guide. Here it is, “ Glenda Nickle and Sande Hafer, a member of the Victoria League of Women Voters, hand out voter guides at Texas A&M-Victoria on Oct. 8, 2025. (Photo courtesy of Glenda Nickle).” Can you see the mistake? Right, it’s the use of the singular noun when referring to two people. I don’t know who wrote the cutline (that’s journo-speak for a photo’s caption), but an editor should have caught it.

In the same story, the first reference to the League of Women Voters is fine — no quibble with the high school-level tone. The second and third references are correctly abbreviated while the reference to Ms. Nickle as president fully spells the organization’s name. Not only is the inconsistency but it’s also not writing tightly. I am not going to deconstruct the whole article, but I’ll point out that using The Associated Press style isn’t evident and I see no indication that the Advocate’s “style” is superior.

Finally, printing news releases verbatim and giving the author the byline is beyond the pale. Truly. The confirmation of Christian Hardigree as the new president for Texas A&M-Victoria is news, but the byline is Chris Bryan, vice chancellor of marketing and communications. Will the Advocate’s illustrious managing editor assign a reporter to interview Ms. Hardigree after she has settled in? Will the Advocate let other candidates post their announcements with bylines? 

We no longer have a newspaper in Victoria. We have a Christian-nationalist supporting propaganda rag and the community is all the poorer for it.

Ethical journalists leave Carpenter Media outlets over MAGAT editing

 Well, well, well. If there was any doubt that the second oldest newspaper in Texas has become a MAGA-supporting rag, we now have a New York Times article and two stories from Alaska Public Media to thank for confirming it. Victoria, we too, are part of the new corporate owners propaganda ecosystem. Harsh words to be sure. Bear with me on this.

The stories out of Alaska report that four journalist from three newspapers have resigned penning a joint letter to Mary Kemmis, a senior vice president and group publisher of — are y’all ready for this? — Carpenter Media Group. That’s right. It’s the same outfit that bought The Victoria Advocate. What happened was that the corporate bosses caved to a clearly right-wing know-nothing Alaska state representative over the content of an article covering a Sept. 17 memorial service for Charlie Kirk, the right-wing provocateur murdered last month. What was Rep. Sarah Vance’s beef with the newspapers’ story about Kirk’s memorial?

Vance objected to the original story’s second paragraph correctly characterizing Kirk as a “Christian Nationalist icon” and accurately reporting that Kirk was a defender of racist views. Even worse, in my view, she did so on her official stationery and her official Facebook page, according to Eric Stone of APM. Further, Stone reported, “Vance accused the paper of bias and said she was ‘aware of’ a campaign to boycott Homer News advertising.”

On her official Facebook page (yes, I checked), she called the description of Kirk as “vile and slanderous.” Never mind, poor Sarah, but you can’t slander a dead person.

Clearly, this type of political meddling is unacceptable. Bowing to pressure such as that wielded by Vance and others of her ilk places the First Amendment at risk. In the current political climate, honest and accurate reporting are facing a clear and present danger.

Which, of course, brings us back to Victoria where we can mourn the death of a newspaper and start referring to it as a propaganda outlet. In this climate, it seems fitting to replace the editorial page quote of our First Amendment with a quote attributed to the Third Reich’s minister of propaganda, Joseph Goebbels, stating, “It is the absolute right of the State to supervise the formation of public opinion.”

I doubt, with an installed a MAGA supporting managing editor, we’ll see this kind of upheaval here. After all, he has joined with the other MAGATs in canonizing Kirk as their martyred saint. Just see his column admiring Kirk as he joins the well-known chorus of repeating lies over and over and over until people start to believe them. Yes, the Advocate is now part of the Christo-fascist echo chamber purveying fêtes, fluff and political falsehoods.

I’ll do my own repetition: I’ve said it before and I”ll say it again, Victoria deserves better.