We got a tip on Friday that there was a case of swine flu at a local school. The tip never made it into print or online. We made our decision based on an email exchange with Dr. Tim Monroe, the head of the Forsyth County Health Department. He said his assumption is that H1N1 is throughout the school system, and that his agency isn’t investigating individual cases. In other words, from his point, to say school X has had a confirmed case would give the impression that school Y is flu-free and that’s not the case. He thinks pople need to go about their lives taking precautions on a global—rather than localized—basis.
From our published reporting, it’s pretty clear that swine flu is making its way through the community. From the newsroom’s standpoint, we don’t plan at this time to write about most individual cases. But we would write about a death from swine flu or from an outbreak that caused a severe disruption to some aspect of our community, whether a workplace, a school or what have you.
There are other ways to look at this, of course. One argument would be that we are withholding information that people need to know, that a student at a school may have had this disease. But if you take the approach that there’s likely a student at every school that’s been exposed, then you can understand where we are coming from. Information without panic.
Your host is Ken Otterbourg, the managing editor at the Winston-Salem Journal. It's a forum to discuss the media, from
The Party salutes the decision. Comrade Olgivy tells me that whoever believes this should be given the Order of Conspicuous Merit, Second Class. We salute the Thought Police. Whenever my son brings home such propaganda again, I will not ask two teachers and another principal for verification. I will become an unperson. We love Newspeak here now and will disavow all knowledge into the Memory Hole. Skating rinks would be used for (vaporized) corpses in the worst circumstance, according to N.C. state law. Delete this from the Kindle and Oceanian law. Information without panic? Doublethink without freedom. It’s like Eastasia. Ungood. Respect the reader not to panic? They are brainwashed worms without the truth, the Proles.
Nothing worse than bad Orwell satire. But seriously, this is what newspapers and every other institution and person does every day. They edit. They make decisions about what to publish/talk about/disclose etc. based on everything that has come across their desk/life. It’s really not that different than coming home from work and your s.o. asking you about your day. You figure out what is relevant to a productive conversation—do you tell her about the two donuts you ate or how the cute waitress flirted with you or how the boss chewed you out?—and hopefully you and your audience are in disagreement on what constitutes relevance. If not, you will know it soon enough.
This is not to equate swine flu with donuts, but the point is that each member of the media can/should determine what it wants to cover. If another media player wants to report on this, have at it. It’s no different than crime coverage. We may report all drug busts over $10,000 in value of drugs siezed; another media may choose $25,000.
we all know editors, if a “tip” comes in, automatically, if they do not want to print it, they will hang some lame excuse, and the #1 excuse is “that happened a week ago.” that means in layman terms, “we missed it.” the number two excuse is “advertisers may not like it.”
there’s no such thing as bad satire, only bad writers. i admit there are some people who do not like my writing in south carolina, but i have a good reputation of letting people know the truth, and some have tagged me with this unshakable investigative banner.
so if my writing was bad, let me be more precise. it’s nothing personal. the real beef is that the health department is editing your newspaper, censoring the news, telling you what to do. no one tells editors what to do. but the mere fact that you feel the need to speak out on this may make some feel that there is a hint of guilt. there’s never an editor’s note unless there’s a problem. poe’s masque of red death is panic. all i want as a parent is knowledge, not rumor.
Tim. The health department isn’t editing the paper. It isn’t censoring the news. Nobody made me do anything. After looking at Monroe’s argument and talking with other people on my staff, some who disagreed with me, I made a decision as managing editor of the paper. Period. If you disagree with it fine, but it wasn’t about censorship or any such thing. I wrote about this on my blog not out of guilt but for a simple reason: It’s a good window into the types of decision-making that happen every day in our newsroom. Time to move on. Thnx
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