Monday, October 8, 2007

Crandon, Part II

In her second posting regarding the Crandon tragedy, McBride again strives to take MSJ to task on their journalistic skills. This time her beef is that the story didn't focus on the timing of the 911 calls to the final confrontation between law enforcement and the gunman. She feels that this aspect of the story should be the gist of the story, and wants to know why there was such a delay by the authorities.

However, if she read the article, she would have gotten at least a partial answer to her questions. The police were unfamiliar with the terrain, they were unsure of the situation except that a person who just shot seven people, killing six, was held up in a home full of potential hostages. Maybe McBride has been watching too many episodes of "24", and doesn't realize that the cowboy approach usually only works in the movies and TV.

Furthermore, as an alleged teacher of journalism, and supposedly covering stories of this nature when she actually worked, she would recognize a developing story in progress and realized that sometimes it takes time to put all of the pieces together. Oh, wait a minute, she almost does:

Maybe the full printed version of tomorrow's story will have more.


But then still goes on with her critique. Sigh.

UPDATE: In the morning MSJ, there is indeed an editorial raising the same questions about the response time to the 911 calls. At the time of this update, there is no acknowledgement of this by McBride.

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