SOUTH BEND, Ind. — The South Bend Tribune unethically deleted a citation to a REAL News Michiana investigation written by political columnist Jack Colwell. The citation was deleted from his column regarding South Bend GOP Mayoral Candidate Desmont Upchurch late last week. RNM and Colwell had been in communication regarding an RNM investigation into Upchurch for nearly a week before Colwell’s column was published.
RNM was tipped off that Upchurch was requesting a sit-down interview with Colwell in which the mayoral candidate was planning to claim the St. Joseph County GOP was racist for not supporting him (even though the lack of support more than likely had to do with Upchurch’s prior Domestic Violence conviction). RNM reached out to Colwell as a professional courtesy to let him know about our investigation regarding Upchurch’s hidden criminal past. As a returned professional courtesy, Colwell agreed to cite RNM in his article. RNM’s notification to Colwell possibly prevented the South Bend Tribune from publishing an outright false story regarding Upchurch’s lack of local GOP support.
Colwell’s article was also published in Howey Politics. However, the HP article contains the unadulterated RNM citation regarding our investigation. HP obviously decided not to unethically delete the citation.
As seen above, the two articles are identical except for the portion mentioning RNM. Colwell describes RNM’s investigation toward the end of the Howey Politics article. That citation is simply deleted from the article that was published in the South Bend Tribune.
RNM reached out to the South Bend Tribune for comment about the obvious unethical editing of Colwell’s column. As of publication, neither of the paper’s editors have responded.
RNM also reached out to Colwell for comment. While Colwell recognized the glaring disparities, he did not want to comment on why the Tribune made the unethical edit or how he felt about the citation being removed.
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