Mark Twain supposedly coined the phrase "never pick a fight with people who buy ink by the barrel."
And, as our AJC colleague Dan Chapman points out, a certain Georgia publisher who buys ink by the truckload exercised his inner Twain over the weekend.
Billy Morris weighed in on the increasingly nasty battle over a 210-mile petroleum pipeline that would run through eastern and coastal Georgia – and land owned by Morris – en route to Florida.
That project by pipeline builder Kinder Morgan has sparked considerable debate along the coast from business leaders, environmental groups and land owners who have united against the build.
Morris owns the newspapers in Augusta, Savannah and Jacksonville – all stops along the Palmetto Pipeline's proposed route. He also owns a 20,000-acre hunters' paradise along the path that could lose an 11-mile stretch of land to the pipeline.
His newspapers have covered every turn of the debate, including a piece this weekend that reported that the pipeline's planners will go forward with the project even if it doesn't win the pending court battle to get state approval to take land.
An unapologetic Morris explains why the journalists in his employ have scrutinized the project in a column that ran this weekend. Here's a snippet from The Augusta Chronicle:
I acknowledge my conflict of interest on this issue and have been wholly transparent in disclosing it. But because of my personal situation, I am not going to hold back the news staffs of our newspapers in aggressively covering a story that is of great importance to our region. And in that coverage, Kinder Morgan will be given ample opportunity to present its case for the pipeline. Neither am I going to hold back my personal views in forums such as this one, which will be clearly delineated from the newspapers' standard editorial content. I readily concede that I have a privileged platform. But I do not apologize for making use of it given the circumstances.
Read the whole piece by clicking here, but don't miss the kicker:
Obviously I am not poor. But certainly I do not have Kinder Morgan's money and resources. What I do have is a voice, and one that represents the vast majority of voices on this issue. And I plan to continue using it as this debate continues.
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