Greenville Mayor Don Parrott visited with us here in the newsroom this past week. The topic was a familiar one, a difficult one — how do we, this community, the City Council, the newspaper, get past differences, agendas, bias and prejudice.
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Or in fewer words, how do we get past Martin Luther King Jr. Drive?
After an hour of honest and sincere exchange, we had solved no problems, and certainly not solved this contentious issue. But it was a good conversation.
About a week or so before the mayor's visit, community activists Keith Cooper and Josh Fischer came to see me. The two are co-leaders of a group that has long held the banner for extending MLK Drive to include East Fifth Street. Their concerns paralleled those of the mayor — from the other side of the street. Our stories had not presented all the facts, they felt. We showed bias against their cause, they said.
That conversation, although not without disagreement, also was an honest and sincere one.
While the two sides remained apart, they did agree on one thing: The newspaper was not properly telling their stories, and as a result the wrong perceptions were loose in the community. And they brought that concern directly to the editor's desk.
This is not an unusual position for a newspaper. Sometimes editors point with pride to instances in which both sides of a controversy are equally chagrined by the paper's handling of their story — a sign that the paper is being fair to all sides. I appreciate that, but it doesn't satisfy me as an editor.
That's because I worry that this sense of inaccuracy or bias could instead come from something lacking in our coverage or presentation or consistency. And if so, it's my job to fix it.
This question is at the heart of our daily challenge on all stories, not just the controversial ones. How can we get every angle in, with proper nuance and emphasis? Every image, every good thing, every bad thing? How can we get all this right, every day?
And what, if when we succeed, the reader misses it. Maybe he or she was out of town, or the paper was stolen, rained on or not delivered, or maybe there were just other things to do that day. We can't report all things on all issues on all days.
Mayor Parrott was concerned that suggestions of a secret meeting of City Council members in regard to the street-naming vote persisted in the community and that the fact that no such meeting took place had not been told. Actually, we did report this, but not emphatically until some time after the first stories about the council's vote appeared.
Cooper and Fischer complained that we had not adequately presented the minority council members complaints about how this vote was handled. They felt that since that story was played on an inside page many people might not have seen it. Such placement also suggested that the story was less significant, they said.
So what do we do? How do we respond?
Just as in the case of
Martin Luther King Drive, there is not an easy answer. But in our conversation with Mayor Parrott we did speak about how the newspaper doesn't take sides — except on the editorial page. And there, as well as, on news pages, the newspaper always will be on the side of our communities, regardless of shortcomings or how stories and photographs are written or displayed or how it all is perceived on the street — whatever that street might be called.
Al Clark is executive editor of The Daily Reflector. Tell him what you think at 252-329-9560 or at aclark@coxnc.com. You can also comment directly on this column at Reflector.com.
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