Talk:Jim McCrery

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Sidebar is incomplete

It has him as the representative from 1988 - 2009, but that's not accurate. He moved to the 5th district for a couple years (1993-1997) and then came back. Cleo Fields was the representative for those years. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 173.72.148.4 (talk) 21:46, 10 March 2012 (UTC)

Biased

The Article is written unprofessionally, mentioning obscure facts, using opinionated descriptions and other things Someone should edit it

Untitled

We have a complaint about this article and it does in fact seem at bare minimum to be extremely unbalanced to treat an obscure magazine article that we admit wasn't picked up by other sources as if it is 50% of the story of this Congressman's life.

For now I blanked this section, pending fact checking and relevancy review, but what would be really grand I think would be to have this article become high-quality. And comprehensive. :)--Jimbo Wales 22:35, 10 February 2006 (UTC)

Jimbo, I did hours of work on the last congressman you asked people to help with and I think I did a great job (here's what it looked like before I got to it; a handfull of other people helped a little bit as well.) However, in this situation I am reluctant because I'm not sure where the boundaries are. The section you blanked is verifiable , and has apparently never been denied, at least as far as I can tell from McCrery's web site. I would be happy to help if there is some assurance that the blanked section, or an improvement on it, can remain in the article. Is that going to present a problem? --James S. 00:37, 11 February 2006 (UTC)

Well, I think Jimbo's point (if I may surmise) was not that it wasn't true but that it didn't merit to take up quite so much of a short article. The best bet would be to cover his policies and history and then include the Advocate information. Incidentally, probably only the first paragraph of the passage Jimbo removed is usable. Chick Bowen 01:34, 11 February 2006 (UTC)

Done. --James S. 05:03, 11 February 2006 (UTC)

This article from USA Today also mentions the Advocate article. However, where the Wikipedia article states "McCrery's press office did not deny any of the assertions when contacted to comment by author Chris Bull, and there is apparently no record of any confirmation or denial on the part of McCrery since.", the USA Today article says "During the 1992 campaign, the Advocate, a national gay magazine, quoted a Dallas teacher as saying he formerly had a relationship with McCrery and accusing him of pandering to his conservative constituents by opposing gay rights. McCrery and his wife, Johnette, vehemently denied the allegations." Until this can be resolved I am removing that passage from the article. Jacoplane 17:34, 12 February 2006 (UTC)

Since there is an actual dispute, I've removed the entire passage. Unless there's an independent confirmation, a single news report with a denial in another shouldn't result in inclusion. --James S. 17:52, 12 February 2006 (UTC)

I re-added the controversial section with the {{dubious}} tag because I've found some more reports of "no comment," and some more reports that McCrery is well-known homosexual, mostly from blogs. So I have asked one of the people making such claims to contribute sources here. --James S. 18:56, 12 February 2006 (UTC)

Im a political Science/Law Student. In addition, this is my Congressman. These rumors are unfounded and create a sentiment of dislike in people in the Shreveport/Bossier area towards Wikipedia. This is unfair and the media has no right to dive into his personal life like this. This man just delivered $3 million dollars to Centenary College, an excellent school! Ironically, one of my great-aunts attended to the care of his children when they were younger-now I will be working along side the Congressman in the future. I said that to say-the judgement needs to be left to those that know him best. Wales, you dont want Oreilly and Limbaugh on you!

{{sofixit}} (kidding). But seriously, you have to understand that we Wikipedians go on the verifiable information that we can gather about a subject. You obviously have a lot of knowledge on the subject, so please help us in improving the article. As you can see in the discussion above, we are very concerned with making sure that the information we provide is accurate. Sure, we make mistakes, but I hope you understand that these are not malicious mistakes, but rather stem from inaccurate or incomplete information (although there are some vandals who purposefully insert false information, which is something we struggle with every day). Regarding someone's privacy, that is not up to us to decide, as we are not a primary source. That is, any information about someone's private life should only be covered in the Wikipedia article if it has been covered by the mainstream media. If you have any other questions or comments, please don't hesitate to ask me on my talk page. Cheers, Jacoplane 23:55, 12 February 2006 (UTC)

Someone added the blogactive URL again. Is there any documentation of a denial, such as a press release, or an actual newspaper article quoting the denial? The Advocate article is sourced, and I don't know how to weigh anonomous requests to squelch a sourced article. I would like to have this settled once and for all. --James S. 23:13, 21 February 2006 (UTC)

Would somebody, preferably a constituent, please phone the congressman's office and get a real, up-to-date denial? I've been removing the allegations in light of the USA Today reports of denials, but there is a lot of evidence on both sides. I'm ambivalent, but agree that we should give the benefit of the doubt when there is an actual primary source for the denial. Given the Advocate article sourcing, a secondary source denial is just weak. Someone please call his staff. --James S. 04:14, 19 March 2006 (UTC)

I also strongly agree with the caution mandated by WP:BLP. Yet, I see Google New hits to articles documenting the denial in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch here, The Washington Post hereand the Dallas Morning News here. Those three publications squarely meet both the standards of WP:BLP and WP:V. Then, why is this denial blanked in the article? SaltyBoatr (talk) 22:59, 8 December 2007 (UTC)

Also, a Google Book Search points to several books that discuss this 'outing'. This appears to meet the threshold of WP:BLP and WP:V. What do other editors think about this? See for instance here and hereSaltyBoatr (talk) 23:24, 8 December 2007 (UTC)

Congressional website

Congressional website (http://mccrery.house.gov/) not working as of right now Mattbrundage 03:16, 26 April 2006 (UTC)

Site working again. Mattbrundage 04:27, 21 May 2006 (UTC)

Republicans Defeating Democratic Incumbents in Louisiana

This line:

"To date, McCrery is the only Louisiana Republican to have unseated a Democratic incumbent at the federal level."

Is unsourced. But at the very least, it has to be wrong, because Bill Cassidy just beat Rep. Don Cazayoux in LA-06 on Nov. 4th. —Preceding unsigned comment added by DavidNYC (talk • contribs) 07:03, 17 November 2008 (UTC)

Outing, revisited

In the wake of the documentary Outrage, which deals with closeted gay politicians, the issue of McCrery's alleged homosexuality is back in the media (see, for example, here). Given the references listed above, I think that a brief mention of the allegation, as an allegation to which McCrery has never responded, would be appropriate, but I'm reluctant to go against the God-King. —Josiah Rowe (talk • contribs) 06:59, 7 May 2009 (UTC)

I think our current situation here is not good. We repeat the allegations of this obscure documentary but we do not mention McCrery's denials. I'm not going to edit this right now because I'd have to review the history to find the denials. It is likely true that McCrery never responded to the documentary film - but he has denied these allegations in the past. My own preliminary view is that they do not deserve mention at all, but I haven't done my homework yet and this case is quite old in my memory now.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 17:10, 19 June 2010 (UTC)

I have removed (again) unsourced claims. I am not opposed to the thoughtful inclusion of balanced claims, but what was here without sourcing was unacceptable. And any inclusion at all has to overcome WP:UNDUE.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 12:40, 22 March 2011 (UTC)

With this edit I've added some basic info on this situation to the personal life section. I've tried to keep this neutral and brief and did not get into any of the specifics of the accusations of the film, other than to say that McCrery is one of the politicians profiled as being a closeted gay man. I also referenced the 20 year old article on which that portion of the film seems to have been based, the place it was published, and the fact that it was not corroborated by other media outlets (according to a book published soon after, and to the film itself, the story was basically ignored, which obviously means it was not corroborated by other media). Finally I included McCrery's response to the film which was essentially "no comment." We might (indeed should) also include any outright denials (at any time) on the part of McCrery with respect to his supposed homosexuality, but I couldn't find one as yet (will keep looking).

I agree with Jimbo's initial concerns here, but I think we can present this in a neutral fashion with proper weight (I'd like to see some expansion of other aspects of the personal life section if we need to balance the claims from the film). I think we would be remiss not to mention this information, in part because this is not actually an "obscure documentary," but rather one which received a great deal of press (both before and after it premiered) and was nominated for an Emmy for Outstanding Investigative Journalism. The fact is that this is an issue that has followed McCrery around for 20 years or more and been written about by a number of sources--it's worthy of a mention, though obviously I'm open to adjusting my initial stab at covering this. --Bigtimepeace | talk | contribs 19:25, 26 June 2011 (UTC)

Okay, I found a source which verifies the past denials by both McCrery and his wife and added a sentence about this to the end of the paragraph. I think this helps with the NPOV issue. --Bigtimepeace | talk | contribs 19:38, 26 June 2011 (UTC)

Thank you. I like the way it reads now, because a reader is very likely to come away with a balanced view of what happened here. At the same time, I still question whether any of this manages to pass WP:UNDUE.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 19:46, 26 June 2011 (UTC)

WP:UNDUE is my main concern at this point as well. While I tried to keep it short, this somewhat overwhelms the personal life section, and indeed the rest of the article is a bit sparse in terms of substance, so the paragraph I added is probably overemphasized. Unfortunately this is, as I'm sure you know, a common problem in our bio articles. Sensationalist news about someone--assuming it is important enough to warrant a mention, and I do think that's the case here--is usually pretty easy to source. More mundane, but still often relevant, details about a person's life or career are sometimes more difficult.

McCrery retired as a pretty important Republican, so what we should really be able to do is say more about his career, his positions, and even aspects of his personal life that are less controversial. I will try to do some of that later in the week. Another strategy might be to space out some of the allegations a bit--they first surfaced in an early campaign apparently, but while it was discussed (including by his opponent) it had little or no effect on that election. It seems talk about it died down for the most part after the early 1990s, and then only resurfaced when the film came out. By McCrery's own admission this has been an issue throughout much of his career, so maybe talking about it more chronologically, and at no greater length that we do now, would help with some of the UNDUE issues (or I suppose it might make them worse).

Anyhow I'll try work on this a bit more, mainly by trying to do a more thorough write-up of his career—I'll maybe see what I can dig up in the way of articles on Lexis Nexis. --Bigtimepeace | talk | contribs 00:41, 27 June 2011 (UTC)

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