What galls me the most is the News and Observer saying that he would never allow anything he knew to be untrue to be printed. What BS.
This. I was at our alma mater (in some capacity) from 1982-1991, and I saw firsthand the orchestrated assassination. The statement you paraphrase from the article is sickening. A more accurate statement would be “Claude would never print something that he didn’t believe to be true or didn’t want to be true.” He never hesitated to sensationalize exaggerations, rumors and outright lies, no matter how questionable the source. He never hesitated to bury or not print at all anything even remotely positive.
The portrait painted by the staff writer is nothing more than a posthumous attempt to highlight Sitton’s conquests while ignoring the ignominy of his methods, to color the man at a higher moral or ethical level than he ever attained.
As the saying goes, I try not to speak ill of the dead, but those of us who were in Raleigh at the time and lived through this know of what we speak. There are many things that our schizophrenic fan base can over-inflate and exaggerate, and I am occasionally guilty of that myself. This is not one of them.
This man was an ethical wasteland, an ego-driven destroyer, and an elitist, filled beyond mortal capacity with self-assured righteousness. He was the worst of the worst, an absolute piece of wind-driven filth, and I don’t give a f*ck who get pissed off because I said it.
