Letter to the Editor / “OF COURSE THE EARTH IS FLAT”

By Roger C. Kostmayer

The Key West Citizen newspaper’s explanation for printing an outrageously inaccurate partisan column, “Of Course the Election was Stolen” on 12/11/2020, was their need to offer a variety of viewpoints that would move us “toward balance”.  In this case, that explanation is inadequate and unconvincing.

The Citizen knows that column by sports gambler Wayne Root, devoid of facts but full of irrelevant sports analogies, was completely false and misleading.  The frivolous legal attempts to steal an American election by the loser of our national election are dangerous to our democracy and threaten our tradition of peaceful transition of power.  The US courts, the Supreme Court, the legal community, bipartisan secretaries of state, the mainstream press, Republican governors and even the President’s sycophantic Attorney General unanimously agreed, publicly, that there was neither fraud nor significant voter abuses that caused this election to be “stolen”, especially in light of the winner taking the popular vote by seven million votes and the Electoral college by the large margin of 75 votes.  Arguing against these facts is an evidence-less absurdity, like insisting the earth is flat.  There are not two reasonable positions here that compromise should balance.  One, the legitimate will of the people, is a fact; the other, expressed in the column, is false and harmful to our democracy..

What should The Citizen editors have done?  What they should do every day – recognize that  the column’s lack of truth and facts did not meet their editorial standards, and decline to published the column.  They also could have published the column along with the editor’s  statement of the truth, facts and reality.

Failure to do either of these things, and print the deeply flawed column, betrays the public trust.

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