News Release to a Mouthpiece

On Friday, August 3, 2007, News Channel 5 reporter Rodney Dunigan presented a three minute story that was both sad and frightening at the same time.  Frightening because it looked like a real news story.  Sad because of all that was left out.  As Al Gore pointed out in his book, Assault on Reason, and www.DailyKos.com points out on almost a daily basis, this story was nothing but a production of the Metropolitan Schools public relations office.  Dunigan asked no questions.  He simply took the publicity at face value and put it on the air.  Maybe he could do no better with the time in which he had to work.  But a real journalist would have gone a little deeper.  The reward for probing questions, however, would have been to be cut out of future information dumps based on the Board of Education's quest for news management. 

The story was about a shortage of twenty-one math teachers.  Some questions unasked: (1) How many math teachers from last year resigned?  (2) How many math teachers were non-reelected?  (3)  Of the non-reelected teachers how many had poor outcomes on the Gateway tests?  (4) Do certain schools have a higher number of turnovers in the math department?  (5) Are there trends in math teacher losses, compared to several years ago?  (6) Is anything being done to make employment in Metro better for the high quality math teachers?

Such depth of reporting is impossible for journalists as we know them today.  But the story could have risen above the "ain't it awful" approach with nothing more added from anyone other than June Keel.  This is another demonstration of Gore's thesis that we cannot expect reason to prevail in a democracy when information is not available.