New York Times Public Editor Byron Calame once again ignores the Times’ abysmal coverage of the Air Amerca scandal. Fortunately, the story continues to get attention on the editorial/opinion pages of smaller papers.

Doug MacEachern, the Arizona Republic columnist who wrote about the Air America loan scandal last week, revisits the issue today. An excerpt:

Details of the transfers remain vague. But most now believe the total was almost $900,000. The transfers - you’ll note we assiduously are avoiding calling them “loans” - appear to have been arranged by Evan Cohen, who at the time was propitiously (for him and Air America) the development director for Gloria Wise and a founding director of the fledgling liberal talk-show network.

Cohen no longer holds either position. No one even seems to know where to find him. For truth-seekers (which until Friday excluded the completely uninterested New York Times), that’s discouraging. For Air America and its avid supporters, though, it constitutes superb cover.

It was Cohen! We couldn’t stop him! He was crazy!

Either Cohen or the 80-year-olds running the Boys and Girls Club, who Air America snidely suggests are incompetent.

Air America put up a statement on its Web site referring to “the allegations of mismanagement and corruption” at Gloria Wise. Like the financial mess has nothing to do with its beneficiaries.

Left unsaid in the Air America version of reality, though, is that with the exception of Cohen and one other principal, the current owners of Air America are largely the same people who owned the network when Cohen was leading its fund-raising charge.

Read the whole thing.

The scandal also got coverage on the editorial page of yesterday’s Rocky Mountain News:

Maybe in New York City, a mere $1 million’s worth of financial shenanigans is hardly worth mentioning for that venerable institution The New York Times, which still proclaims on its front page every day, “All the news that’s fit to print”

Still, it is rather odd that until Friday, the Gray Lady had not seen fit to print anything about the $875,000 that was in some mysterious fashion transferred from the accounts of the Gloria Wise Boys and Girls Club in the Bronx to Progress Media, which launched the self-styled progressive radio network Air America in March 2004….

Among many other murky parts of this story are whether Piquant knew about the dicey transactions when it took over, where the money went, whether Piquant is obligated to pay the money back - although it has said it would - and what arrangements have been made to do that.

Deborah Simmons, writing in the Washington Times, wishes conservatives would pay less attention to the Air America angle and more attention to the Boys and Girls Clubs:

[S]omebody of consequence ought to be speaking up on behalf of the Boys and Girls Clubs, and the litany of prominent alumni is but one place to start. After all, there is far more at stake than the sullying of some lefty media organ.

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