If The Richmond Times-Dispatch and its Sisters Did Their Job the Virginia Department of Corrections Wouldn't Be A Charnel House of Barbarity by William Thorpe

Okay here is a typical Richmond Times-Dispatch act when informing the public on anything concerning a prisoner held by The Virginia Department of Corrections [VADOC]: we're given the prisoners name then a listing of why the prisoner is in prison. This formula is followed religiously regardless of the circumstance necessitating the coverage.

This work isn't intended to get all into the pros, cons and utility of the formula but to simply point out an inconsistency with the logic of the formula and its use by Virginia's mainstream and corporate media of which The Richmond Times-Dispatch presumes leadership.

The inconsistency is this, there is deviation when the coverage is of the Virginia Department of Corrections. So instead of the public being informed as when the subject is a prisoner that VADOC, as Department is a serial offender and violator with tens of thousands of claims against it, that VADOC as a State agency uses taxpayer money contesting and challenging claims of violations without accountability, because Richmond Times-Dispatch and its Sisters are derelict (I don't want to suggest complicity even though I'd be on solid ground) in pointing that fact to the public, that as part of the Executive branch of Virginia's government and the fact Virginia Code 53.1 was changed to allow the Selected or rather unelected Director of Corrections complete speculation and experimentation over running the Department and treatment of prisoners, which in turn presents the myriad violations taxpayers fund its adjudication and because the Director of Corrections is an expression of political ideology the response therefore is political action by voting against it and such political action can only be taken if the electorate are educated by Virginia's media. Virginia's media have sued, taken legal action against the Commonwealth when it was in their particular interest, see: Richmond News Papers Inc. v. Virginia 448 US 555 (1980) and Richmond News Papers Inc. v. Commonwealth 222 va. 574 in defending the Freedom of The Press and it was socially good still the concurrent harm their obsequiousness to for example VADOC's 2/16/2022 press release declaring its expectation that the media self-censors thus sacrificing Virginians at the altar of VADOC's pursuit of barbarity due to an inability, an unwillingness to begin from the most basic and simplest of propositions: that no one, especially prison officials and VADOC who are sworn to abide, obey and comply with law are above it.

We are not in 2023 indicting Richmond Times-Dispatch and its Sisters for their active participation at worst and at least complicity in the savagery of the Commonwealths past, because redemption is the ability to correct.

By William Thorpe

I'm William Thorpe Virginia exiled me to the Texas prison system. I'm solitary confined at the Wainwright. Unit.