WLOSers have a story today about a car driving through a get-out-the-vote rally for Barack Obama supporters on Eagle and Markets streets in downtown Asheville on Saturday.
The driver ran through barricades and drove through streets with children and adults strolling around for the event. WLOSers said people had to jump out of the way of the SUV driver.
That’s the basics. But here’s where WLOS verged on the irresponsible: they teased the story Saturday evening in the lead-up to their 11 o’clock broadcast by asking: “Was it politically motivated?”
That is a loaded question in these high-strung days leading up to Nov. 4, and WLOSers should have known better than even suggest it. Because if they’d looked at police reports, they would have seen that the guy was arrested for being drunk and/or drugged out of his frackin’ mind. In their story, they even quote a couple of people who tell the camera that it was obvious that the driver was whacked out of his mind.
Where is the restraint? It’s apparently vanished, as we saw in how the Citizen-Times handled the reporting of the dead bear found at the entrance of Western Carolina University with a couple of Obama signs stuck to its head. The newspaper elevated the event to prominent news without knowing all the facts. In the age of the Internet, that kind of half-reported story goes viral and around the world, and all of a sudden you have a lot of people making assumptions about someone’s motivations. The dead bear incident also was not politically motivated, according to police, and the Citizen-Times ended up apologizing for an explosive editorial that it wrote.
If local media wants to retain its reputation as the place to go for informed, sane discussion, it needs to maintain some level of responsible conduct in the way it reports stories.