I expect more from my local news source!

The Ferndale Record ran an article (10/9/2013) on the Ferndale City Council Forum sponsored by the Ferndale Chamber of Commerce.  As would be expected, it was not a verbatim account of what was said, therein lies a problem. The article leaves one with the impression that the candidates were all pretty much on a par. For me this was anything but the case.

What I witnessed  greatly influenced my assessment of candidate performance in the forum. Here are three examples. One candidate appeared so overwhelmed by his presence before the public as to be virtually incapable of putting together complete sentences. Another candidate, spoke in such blue sky academic political philosophical speak, that I found my self almost gasping for air. Yet another was glib enough to answer a question with “What he said”.

It generally goes without saying that local elections rarely generate the much public interest. This was evident in the rather limited turn out for the forum. The bulk of the audience appeared to be, I can only assume, high school civics students. In total, I doubt that there were fewer than 50 people in attendance , though I made no effort to count them, nor apparently did the Record reporter.

Given that there will likely be very few additional opportunities for the public to actually hear from most of the candidates, as well as the low attendance at the forum, it seems even more important that the Record coverage provide more than a sanitized selective summation of the candidates responses.

I don’t envy the reporters task in trying to report about this event. It is impractical to report every word spoken. Lay upon that the presumption that reporting only be factual and value neutral and you’ve got a real problem. In spite of those things, I believe that The Ferndale Record, should have more accurately reflected/characterized the performance of the candidates on the forum.

The performance of candidates in this forum contained real information that should be available to the public. The Ferndale Record has, I believe, a responsibility to the public to do some critical performance assessment. If it couldn’t include it in the article then an attendant editorial would have been appropriate.