Love Us, Hate Us

I really love to read the Beachcomber. It is intelligent, factual and not afraid to speak truth.

Barbata Wallace

It is informative, friendly and funny. I like the Beachcomber.

Mimsie May

I just finished up a Fall 2019 internship with the Beachcomber as a reporter. I loved the experience. Jay Beeler was a great person to learn from and I cherish the time spent and value the skills I was able to cultivate while there.

Eric Bailey

During the ten years that I published an award-winning weekly newspaper in Eastern Connecticut, we always went that proverbial “extra mile” to avoid unwarranted, unjustified, unprovable and particularly unprofessional attacks on elected officials. Nothing like that high journalistic standard applies at the Beachcomber, obviously, as clearly proven by the unwarranted, unjustified, unprovable and very-unprofessional attack of Beachcomber Editor/Publisher Jay Beeler on Congressman Alan Lowenthal, followed by Beeler’s refusal to retract that same unwarranted, unjustified, unprovable and very-unprofessional attack at the express request of a Lowenthal staffer. Instead, on Jan. 17, Beeler compounds his poor journalism with further libelous and slanderous attacks he terms “wit & wisdom.”

Anyone who has ever studied logic or critical thinking knows that the absolute weakest form of argument is the “third party hearsay” in which an unidentified third person allegedly makes some vicious unproven attack on some official or other person, which is then circulated by irresponsible journalists. Such hearsay abuses truth when it attempts to turn an unsupported allegation into a fact, regardless of its falsity or the damage which it does.

There are well-known signs of such tactics, such as refusal or failure to attribute the unproven attack to a specific named person; typical consistency of the unproven attack with well-known biases, views and previous attacks along the same lines by the “third party”; and above all a failure to provide any solid proof or justification or background for the unproven attack. Such slimy tactics are the stock-in-trade of such blatantly fallacious media as The National Enquirer and comparable tabloids specializing in lies and often run by liars, or those who tolerate lies and liars in the interest of selling more scandalous copies.

And so it is now clear that the Beachcomber Editor/Publisher Beeler is of the same ilk as those nasty and despicable tabloids, given his blatant refusal to retract or even modify his vicious personal attack on our congressman, instead accusing him of conflicts of interest and violations of his oath of office, which would be libelous and slanderous were Lowenthal not a public figure upon whom “freedom of the press” allows a somewhat-broader right-of-comment than is the case with strictly-private individuals. Nevertheless, Beeler’s long history of taking advantage of rights-of-comment to promote his own agenda has been demonstrated once again in this instance.

The Beachcomber editor/publisher totally fails to understand that responsible journalism is essential to freedom of the press; and that cheap and undocumented shots at those he dislikes only reflect very poorly on him and on his publication, rather than on his targets.

It takes a “big person” to apologize for his harmful errors; Jay Beeler has a very long way to go to ever become such a “big person.”

Eugene Elander

[Publisher’s Note: The ill-informed writer is another enabler of the “Divided States of America” who authored “Trump Demeans America and Our Constitution,” published in The Day, a New London, Conn. newspaper.]