With just one exception, I have never used this blog to criticize another Hudson Valley newspaper. Yes, I think we at the Freeman provide the best local news coverage, but I don’t feel the need to make that point publicly — or expose what I see as the shortcomings of other local media — because I believe our work speaks for itself, and I see no real benefit in bad-mouthing others.

But I have been so steamed since reading the most recent edition of one of the local weekly newpapers (henceforth to be referred to as "the weekly"), that I cannot hold my tongue.

A front-page story in the July 31 edition of the weekly, reporting on a grisly killing in the East Kingston section of the town of Ulster, was headlined “Hate crime? Police consider anti-gay motive in East Kingston homicide.”

The headline, and the premise of the story, were wrong — dead wrong — and I’ll explain why in a moment. First, though, some background for those of you who don’t follow local news:

Firefighters, responding to a call of a vehicle ablaze the afternoon of July 25 in a wooded area of East Kingston, found a gray Nissan pickup on fire and a dead man inside. In the days that followed, police said the truck was registered to a 59-year-old Kerhonkson man named Michael Kleiman and that Kleiman had not been seen since. Police would not, however, say that the dead man was, in fact, Kleiman because they were — and still are — awaiting the results of DNA tests. (We later learned the tests were needed because the dead man’s head and hands apparently had been removed before the truck was set ablaze, meaning the body could not be ID’d through dental records or fingerprints. Police would not confirm this, though they did say the man was killed elsewhere and then brought to the East Kingston woods, where the pickup was torched.)

We — and when I say “we,” I mean Freeman ace reporter Paul Kirby — also learned Kleiman was/is gay, though we didn’t see any reason to publish that fact unless it turned out to be relevant to the crime.

Then came Ginny Apuzzo’s e-mail, which was sent to both Kirby and the weekly.

Apuzzo, who runs a local group for gays called the LGBTQ Community Center, wrote that police had contacted the center, seeking any information that its members might have about Kleiman. In the same e-mail, Apuzzo wrote that “police believe the murder may be gay-biased.” In other words, a hate crime.

The weekly simply took Apuzzo’s written words and ran with them. “Hate crime” in the headline. “Anti-gay attack” in the first paragraph. Sensationalism at its best — and ugliest.

If the reporter at the weekly had bothered to get Apuzzo on the phone and ask her the obvious question — “Did police really say this to you?” — he would have gotten the same answer that Kirby got when he posed that query to her. It was a sheepish response along the lines of “Uh, no, I just assumed.”

And if the reporter at the weekly had bothered to get town of Ulster Police Chief Paul Watzka on the phone and ask him the obvious questions — “Did your department tell Ginny Apuzzo this might have been a hate crime?” and “Do you believe it was a hate crime?” — he would have gotten the same answers that Kibry got: “Absolutely not” and “Absolutely not.” And, indeed, our July 31 story on the homicide carried the following sentence: Watzka said emphatically on Wednesday that police do not believe the killing was a bias crime.

In this era of instantaneous electronic communications, it’s tempting and oh so easy to simply take words from press releases, e-mails, text messages and voice mails and repeat them as facts. But that’s not journalism, that’s regurgitation. Journalism involves digging deeper, asking follow-up questions, checking and double-checking facts and being 100 percent sure of a story’s accuracy before putting it in print.

The Freeman knows this and made sure to get the Apuzzo story right before publishing it. I wish I could say the same for the weekly.