Harvey Yates, sinking his oily hands into New Mexico

I didn't realize that Yates, scion of THE Yates oil and gas plutocrats, had bought Española's Rio Grande Sun earlier this year. (Of course, it had been a semi-laughingstock itself long ago, goosing its circ by selling in Santa Fe and Duke City so that the big city folks could get their jollies laughing at the drug crimes in one of the Land of Dis-Enchantment's armpits.

That's part of the discussion in this New Mexico Searchlight piece about Yates widening the spread of his oily talons across the state.

His ultimate goal, per the piece, seems to be a drive into browbeating the Valencia County Commission into changing various zoning laws so he can drill — and frack — in the Albuquerque Basin.

As for his claims that NM Media is dominated by Gannett? Laughable. Hobbs is owned by a small scale company, or was. The Albuquerque Journal's Number Nine Media dominates print media in the Albuquerque Basin, including the Valencia County Bulletin in Belen, and No. 9 is semi-wingnut. Carlsbad and Cruces are Gannett, tis true. Duke City teevee? KOB is a smaller chain. KOAT is Hearst. KRQE is Nextstar. Farmington's paper is Gannett, but I"m unaware of it ever saying a bad word about either fracking or flaring.

It's also laughable, is his implication that Gannett, now Craphouse of course, is run by a bunch of wild-eyed bomb-throwers. However, I'm sure he hates even the slightest mention of climate change on its news pages. It's also laughable to read about his circumlocutions about fracking. He probably also hates to see the slightest mention of fracking, injection well earthquakes, etc. in any of those papers. Of course, that's assuming there's anybody left at those papers. It's a bit richly hypocritical for the Fanta Se paper folks to report on the details of Gannett's hollowing out in New Mexico, but here you go. (That said, it is the Capital City's alt-weekly, not the New Mexican.) Gannett doesn't even have a local reporter at its Ruidoso or Alamogordo papers.