On Transparency in the Editorial Process
The importance of knowing what you don't know.
Overnight WSBTV published an article titled “Student accuses Coweta County teacher of choking her in class”.
A read through the article details the allegations by a 14 yr old female student of Northgate Highschool and her mother, neither of which are identified.
Throughout the day, as happens everyday, I was forwarded the article by members of the community, and earlier this afternoon I was finally able to view the article. After reading it, I do what I do, I request information.
In this case that request was from the Coweta County School System. In my experience request for information regarding incidents like this will go unanswered with the school system waiting until they’ve had sufficient time to investigate and “ get ahead of the story “. This is echoed by a statement in the very article referenced.
A district spokesperson told Channel 2′s Brittany Kleinpeter that they don’t wish to comment during an active investigation, only sharing that they are aware of the alleged incident.
Given I’m not going to be getting any information from the school system anytime soon - and when I do it will be the same prepared statement that is released to all media outlets, mixed with the fact that I have not been contacted by, and have no means of contacting either the student or the parent to interview them, and all I have left is the short article by WSBTV.
So I did what I do in all of these cases, I put it on my radar and went about researching and writing up information that I can actually add something meaningful to.
The Information Deficit
I had no intent of sharing the article for a few reasons.
I openly dislike the journalism, or lack thereof, shown by most if not all members of the WSB staff. I find it wholly lacking, reeking of minimal sourcing and slathered in sensationalism. All the things I detest the most in mainstream media.
For all the reasons stated above, I had zero information to add to that which was already published by WSBTV and anything I’d publish would just be plagiarizing their reporting, again something I’m not going to do.
This entire thing is the perfect example of what I call an Information Deficit, or in the case of reporting on something, being in an Information Deficit. I know exactly as much as everyone else about the facts of this incident and that is jack shit.
The danger of this, and why I will almost always refuse to report on, or publish information from the position of an Information Deficit, can easily be seen in the comments of my share of the WSB article.
Every comment made on that post, regardless of which side was being taken, was as functionally useless as a snowball in Hell. Both groups on either side of the argument are just as devoid of the true facts of the incident as the other side. Neither side has any additional facts not available to the other, neither or right or wrong based on the context of the known information of the incident.
What’s left is a comments section of bias, ignorance, self-righteousness and a bunch of people that fail to understand the staggering amount they don’t know compared to what they do. A literal zero-sum war of words that does nothing to help find the truth of the incident at hand, or better the world.
This is probably the biggest reason I don’t post or share things like this unless I have facts to put in context. I have no interest in providing a platform for this mindless troll-fare.
Add on to that the racial component some have painted the incident with while having ZERO evidence of any racial motivation outside of that cast upon by bias trolls, and it makes me want to puke.
The Last Time
In February of this year, 11Alive ran a story regarding a student that was “ dragged from a school room “ at East Coweta High School.
In this case, I did the same, read the article, requested information and decided that I had nothing to add, that it was already being covered by other, larger media outlets and I decided not to cover the story on NCST.
I didn’t take half the shit for that in it’s entirety as I have in less than 12 hours of this incident being covered by WSBTV.
Oh, and there were a couple glaring differences between this incident and the current one, the first of which being the parents put their name behind it.
But probably the most glaring difference is there was a video of the incident being accused.
Conclusion
I am not a major news outlet, I’m not even a small news outlet. I don’t have the available hours or resources to be an investigative journalist.
I’m one guy. I leverage the scanners and open records as well as media request to provide as much FACTUAL information as possible to the community as possible.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, if I can’t speak factually and intelligently on something, I’m just not going to speak on it.
If I don’t think a particular topic is appropriate for the NCST Platform, then I’m not going to cover it.
I have a finite amount of time and resources and i do the absolute best I can to try and focus that on doing as much good as possible.
If you expect anything else, honestly, you’ll be disappointed every time.
I love this community, I love providing information to it and I will keep doing so as long as I possibly can.
- The Admin
