Larry Van Guilder, a writer over at E.W. Scripps owned Shopper News had an article this week about Candidate for Property Assessor Phil Ballard and how he had several employees that volunteered to reduce their hours from 37.5 to 30 hours to reduce the cost of payroll budget. The problem with Van Guilder’s story is that he failed to interview those employees “that took one for the team”, the ones “that stepped up”. You see Van Guilder made the honest mistake of believing a politician that what the politician said was 100% accurate. If Ballard was so confident in his spin, he would have supplied the phone numbers of all of those employees to Van Guilder and allowed Van Guilder to interview them and publish their comments with either attributing (giving credit to the person) or allowing the employees to go “off the record” and attributing their comments as unnamed. Now, that’s Journalism 101, not being the published record for politician spin.
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Shopper Writer Misses The Story, The Whole Story and Nothing But The Story
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