LETTERS: Conflicts of Interest, Rehashing Cheney, and Big 'Picture' Questions

By: With the departure of Online Editor Jay Defoore, we've been a little tardy in getting letters posted here and this may continue for a while. Please bear with us!

If you want to add your voice to the discussion, send us an e-mail at letters@editorandpublisher.com.

Interested in Conflicts of Interest

To the Editors: Why does Connie Schultz have a possible conflict of interest now, or if her husband wins his Senate race? Brown has been in Congress for years. In fact, he began running for office as soon as he finished college. Does E&P or any other news outlet plan to survey the family relationships among prominent journalists and elected politicians? Sure would be interesting, in the interests of full consumer disclosure.

Mark Richard
Columbus, Ohio

Cozy Sources are a Double-Edged Sword

The two Texas newspaper reporters who broke the Cheney story seem to suffer from being a part of the institution instead of covering the institution. Local journalism has a peculiar set of circumstances not faced by national reporters which often leads to this syndrome. Local reporters are a part of the community and often have life-long and day-to-day relationships with the people they cover and the sources they rely on for information. The smaller the community, the more all this becomes true and the more reporters feel a part of that which they are covering.

This is probably why a reporter would accept as unchallenged fact a Sheriff's statement that, "We've known these people for years, they would not call us and lie to us." It also would explain the reporter's statement that they "don't want to look like pit bulls." One wants to take the reporter by the hand to a quiet booth in the rear and over a cold beer say, "This is precisely when you need to start disbelieving, when a law enforcement official says someone involved in a shooting accident would not lie -- that is not how police think. There is something wrong."

It would also explain why the reporters expressed gratitude for the cooperation and information from authorities and the hospital. They see and know those people and perhaps attend church with them or cheer their kids in local high-school sports. But, public information is just that, and journalists owe no debts of gratitude to people who provide that which, by law, they are required to provide.

But, what is not explained is what has happened to a reporter's sense of "something's up" when the vice-president of the United States accidentally shoots a fellow hunter, hides behind his secret service agents, and boogies out of town and does not report the accident for eighteen hours. What is not explained is why an accident which is redolent of the same scent one catches when a drunk driver involved in a hit-and-run eludes the police for a sufficient time to clear their system and establish a story does not trigger a reporter's pit-bull tenacity in gnawing through the gristle of obfuscation to the hard white bone of truth.

Mr. Cheney's acknowledgement of fault does not, by half, satisfy the unanswered questions in Corpus Christi. And, while over that frothy mug of beer, since one of those reporters seems not to understand why this is so important. I would explain that "all this is important because the second most powerful man in the world was involved in a hunting accident on your beat and there seems to be enough to suggest that perhaps that man is not fit for such responsibility and that the full story is not known. We know, for a fact, that he was careless, that he high-tailed out of town during a moment of crisis, and there is a possibility that he was impaired. You cannot expect his friends or authorities to cooperate, how are you going to develop your story?"

Sometimes local journalists have to take on the challenging task of developing a story rather than reporting what others have to say.

Shane Fox
Promotion Manager, Tyler (Texas) Morning Telegraph

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'Flushing' Out Cheney Discrepancies

Can anyone please help me reconcile the following discrepancies:

"...Cheney told the sheriff's department that a single bird flew behind him and he followed the bird by line of sight in a counter-clockwise direction,.."

On Fox, Cheney said,"... but bird flushed and went to my right, off to the west. I turned and shot at the bird, and at that second, saw Harry standing there."

Right is clockwise, left is counter-clockwise, which is it?

Cheney said, "..Covey is flushed, we've shot, and each of us got a bird. Harry couldn't find his,.." But the police report states Cheney didn't bag a bird in the first flushed covey and walked about 100 yards to a second covey discovered by Bo Hubert, which is it?

Thank you,
Chris Dodson

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Contradictions of Faith

Here's the problem, as I understand it: It is wrong, according to Islam, to make graven images of the Prophet because it could lead to worshipping the man and not Allah.

Now the Danish cartoonists are not Muslim so the potential for worshipping the Prophet seem a little far-fetched. Furthermore, wasn't the whole point of NOT making graven images so the Prophet would not be raised above his station (as a human being not to be confused with being a deity)? It's an order-of-the-universe thing. While the Prophet is probably considered the greatest of all men (I'm just guessing here), the whole point was to protect Allah's absolute sovereignty and not get into the 3-for-one Christian-Trinity boondoggle.

By having riots and beatings and killings and burnings across the World, the hypersensitive modern Muslims are doing precisely what the Prophet warned them from doing: They're are elevating him above his place in the Universe and into the realm of the Divine.

While the Danes were reminding Muslims that Islam is a religion of peace through some mildly shocking cartoons -- those whom are burning shops and killing people are a sacrilege to God and an apostasy to the Faith.

Philip Wolfe

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Running Question

Q. Why would anyone show these [Abu Ghraib] images again? Especially in light of many editors decisions to not run cartoons of Muhammad in the U.S. because they "didn't need to be seen for people to understand the gist of the story." I think a discussion is in order about our free press's decisions to run certain images and not others.

Respectfully,

Joe Moran
Kansas City, Mo.