Daily Kos: DE-AL: Castle (R) stroke severity covered up by local media. If this story is true, it’s like one of those old movies.
Only I don’t think we are going to get Jimmy Stewart saving the day.
I find it hard to believe that a newspaper could be as corrupt as is being suggested. They are not, after all, Republicans in Congress.
It may be mostly incompetence rather than conspiracy. For example, their most recent article on the story (that I could find) noted in one place that he’d had multiple strokes and later had his cardiologist talking about a single stroke. If it was a coverup, they’d at least stick to a single version throughout the article. It would be perfectly ordinary to want to stay out of the public eye for a while after some kinds of strokes because, even though they don’t affect reasoning power and don’t mean the person is in any kind of danger, they do cause effects that would make the candidate look bad. Obviously Castle’s campaign lied several times about how long he was in the hospital and should be called on that, but there’s every reason to believe the newspaper is just careless rather than criminal. (I don’t know whether they have a history of this sort of thing or not.)
My father recently had a stroke which caused severe vertigo. He would have been a disaster on the campaign trail; lurching around, his eyes jerking wildly about, and then throwing up on his opponent. But he could think clearly throughout and was out hiking and river rafting within a month or two.
The News Journal is not exactly a stellar newspaper…in fact it is somewhere at or below the level of the Miami Herald (or any of the other Knight-Ridder papers that I have had the dubious “honor” of reading). I’m pretty sure Mojo is correct that there is no major conspiracy here and just incompetence and poor reporting.