If you are one of the eight other readers of Syracuse's semi-daily newspaper and affiliated clickbait-machine website you may have noticed a bearded man in a black t-shirt standing in front of piles of metal. Scrap-metal magnate, philanthropist, political megadonor, and wannabe bitcoiner Adam Weitsman has gone from minor local celebrity with front-row seats at The Dome to object of the P-S's undivided lust. No longer satisfied with unrequited, departed loves like Syracuse Native Tom Cruise or Syracuse Native Post Malone, our local scribes have gone on an aggressive public communications campaign for the multi-millionaire.
A google search of syracuse dot com and "Adam Weitsman" will return dozens of articles on his various Skaneateles real estate transactions and affiliation with Jim Boeheim over the past several years, but have turned up the full-court press recently, with seven featured articles headlining the site in just three months.
Now, I shan't fault our local scribes for their celebrity crush. My old friends in Boston always seemed to have a place in the names section for Maria Menounos or whichever Wahlberg was on television that week. However, I have some worries about the objectivity here. When one of Weitsman's subsidiary companies, Ben Weitsman & Son, was sued by the Sierra Club in May for inadequately protecting against pollutants in stormwater runoff, the Post-Standard showed remarkable restraint. While their standard practice has been to have a staff reporter covering Weitsman's various adventures, this time they chose to run a syndicated news story written by Rick Karlin of the Albany Times-Union. Not the full, article, though: while the Times-Union article mentions Adam Weitsman as the proprietor, the Post-Standard one conspicuously fails to mention him by name.
This is not to begrudge Weitsman's success nor to devalue his many charitable contributions. The problem becomes when the fawning coverage of his infinity pool comes isn't balanced by merited criticism. It also seems to come at the expense of local coverage of actual issues that these staff writers could be assigned; the paper has devoted one (1) article to the candidates running for the Syracuse school board. Its coverage of the Onondaga County Legislature elections has been almost entirely horse-race driven, talking in sports terms about both parties trying to make gains with just a single article discussion the individual candidates. As the region's main newspaper, a modicum of commitment to news would be appreciated.
