The Montana Suicide Rate Reduction Council. 

 Founded in Missoula, Montana. August 06, 2021.

 

Hate the fate. Reduce the rate

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There is no excuse for protecting the names of each and every public official behind these problems. The patent if not sociopathic behavior within Montana Department of Health is benefiting from poor local to Montana news reporting. Cleaning house, as it were, requires more than just a feather duster. There will be far less chance of any improvement if Montana media continues to act in the way that they are. But bad actors are just not acceptable, and they must not be allowed to get away with thier shit.

This is a scourge upon the very intent of good journalism, not providing the public reasonable full disclosure of established facts. The public's right to know is being ignored. Local media should be knocking on the office doors of these officials in Helena. Kyle Fouts, for example, came to MT from AZ, where he made himself known as very controversial figure in the corrections industry. This writer lived in AZ during his time there, and yes, he is known as more of a problem maker than he is anything else. It was crucial to hear the testimony from a former MSH psychologist, wherein she clarified this simple fact. Corrections officials always choose to avoid scrutiny, and they do that through the corruption in our prison systems. This writer also dealt with a corrections official from South Dakota circa 2011-12, who found himself immersed in a scandal at the AZ State Hospital, and he was fired in 2015. No small thanks to Phoenix media, but Phoenix media only got onto it after they heard about me.  

Conversley speaking, reasonably objective news reporting will not find any life if corporate news entities have the control, the control of the narrative, all of it.  They are public officials, and they do not deserve the level of privacy that media is giving them.

Montana media should be knocking on the doors of these officials in Helena. There is no excuse to not take that much trouble. The value of the citizen voice is immense, and Montana media needs to take this to heart.  

Lee News has monopolized over 75% of all mainstream media resources in Montana. Takeover of independent media is on point with what we are seeing in Ukraine today, independent media being eaten by Russia is little different from media being taken over by corporate interests in the US. 

Reporter Seaborn Larson works for the Missoulian newspaper, and Lee News is the parent company over this newspaper interest. Controlling the narrative, nothing more, nothing less. The inaccuracies, the gravely biased range of sources, the lack of legitimate investigative approaches all adds up to grossly flawed reporting, and putting corporate interests ahead of the interests of the public. This plays right into the hands of public officials who seek to avoid due scrutiny. It's that plain. To the extent that it resembles outright complicity, well, that will be talked at a later time. 

There is hard data included in the the public record, and there is an ocean of sources in the rural areas of our state. To even discuss the suicide crisis in Montana without including the citizen voice is misguided on its face, and to allow this to be supposedly investigated without the citizen voice is just bad journalism.  And, with suicide in Montana as the one issue at stake, the refusal of media to take the trouble to not include those voices is an affront to what is going on out there in our rural areas. 

Bad actors will continue to act badly if not identified. Even my own limited data includes the names of people like Jeff Pfluge, who aggressively sought to suppress the report of the 2016-17 crisis at Montana State Hospital, and that of the longtime Board of Visitors representative at MSH, attorney Craig Fitch, who has condoned retaliation towards patients and who has been present during all crisis at MSH for the last 17 years. No matter how else this two men are looked at, they were both present during these crises, they are public officials and they both work for the state. Local media should be knocking on the doors of these officials in Helena.  

The Montana Suicide Rate Reduction Council will not entertain any such suppression of these facts. What we will report on are the collective responses. Media is failing at this point, and this is allowing bottom feeding sources to skew the truth. Media is also failing to include the citizen voice, by and large, are talking to just about everybody other than the public in their coverage of these concerns.