Reporting or Opinion? You make the call!

So you picked up this week’s Villager and are perusing the fine reporting on such things as the recent Hiram Council meeting, or perhaps the reporting on the guided tours of the Arsenal which the government and Ohio EPA ocnducted recently. (I still say burn the place to the ground.) Then you turn to the second page and see that Windham Village Council had a meeting and it is the subject of not one, but two articles! Whew, must have been some meeting.

(The Notes from the meeting will be late as Shelley Craine who usually collects them has been away due to a family illness. Our thoughts and prayers are with her and her family.)

Reporter for most Village meetings, Jody Schroath, separated remarks dealing with the recent Discussion Board meetings concerning the Hot Stove State Championships and rumors flying about that the Council was trying to make a few bucks off of it through concessions or some such.

Correctly pointing out that people’s imaginations have a bad tendency to get away from them, Ms. Schroath shifts from reporting to offering her opinions concerning “People would rather be angry than right.” She offers this paragraph in the article.

Oh, Windham is not alone. Its residents have plenty of good company, from the millions of people who listen to national talk-shows and believe what they hear without bothering to check on the facts to the growing numbers of subscribers to one-sided worldwide Web blogs.

First off, the term is “web log” if you’re referring to it as such, “blog” is the shortened term. Regardless, how does this paragraph lend itself to a better understanding of what’s going on here in Windham? Isn’t it a bit condescending to those of us who were actually waiting for the facts of the case to come out? Rather than focus on the issue at hand, she (unknowingly likely) pats us poor Windhamites on the head and say, “don’t you worry your little heads, everyone else does it too.”

The great complaint by those on the left side of the aisle for years has been that popular talk radio is dominated by right-wing talkers. Because of this, its obvious that all folks who listen to such talk radio are “mind-numbed robots” who don’t really think for themselves. Surely they don’t bother to check on the facts like the vastly more intelligent left-wingers do. They’re just a bunch of right-wing, conservative, evil, rich, child-starving Republicans who just don’t know any better and don’t have the sense to look things up.

To that, I humbly offer the wisdom found in such websites as Daily Kos, left-wing blog extraordinaire. Consider one of the diaries hosted on the kossacks website and the comments following.

I suppose that Ms. Schroath is making a general comment concerning both sides of the aisle, Democrat and Republican alike. The root of the problem is that the statement really has little place in reporting the goings on at a Village Council Meeting. It is fodder for an opinion article at best.