News broke this week that U.S. Sen. Angus King, a left-wing independent, conspired with Twitter and Facebook to censor people who were critical of him on social media during his 2018 campaign against State Sen. Eric Brakey (R-Androscoggin).
The Lewiston Sun Journal, one of the last daily newspapers in the state of Maine to cover the story, for some reason edited all mention of Brakey out of the print edition.
Brakey and many of his supporters were the victims of King’s tech censorship tactics, with many of them getting banned permanently from the social media platforms, but for some bizarre reason the editors at the Journal decided that his perspective was less newsworthy than some professor.
The original story, written by Randy Billings of the Portland Press Herald, contained an interview with Brakey. But someone at the Journal left it on the cutting room floor — an odd decision considering Brakey represents Androscoggin County.
UPDATE: The Sun Journal said on Twitter Wednesday afternoon that Brakey was edited out of the story because the story needed to be “trimmed for space.” So just to be clear: the paper avoided any mention of the story, which broke on Saturday, for more than three days. Then they let another newspaper’s reporter write the story for them, and then they edited out Brakey, even though he represents a State Senate district that includes the paper’s main circulation. The reader can see below which paragraphs the editors decided to keep and judge for themselves whether “space” was the primary consideration.
