we saw that...

two examples of media general/kalb using town talk stories for news

tonight on the six p.m. news kalb must have used two town talk stories for news. the first one was a story the town talk posted to their website at 12:34 pm cst captioned: "ethics hearing for lawson and brown postponed until march." [screen grab] kalb anchor dale hoffman, begin the bit by stating "published reports." we weren't able to record the "published" part but if you play with the video timer bar you can hear when mr. hoffman said "...reports."

although, whoever wrote the script for that bit was very clever in writing "reports" in the plural, the town talk story and a central la politics blog post "lawson & brown ethics hearing continued!" time-stamped 11:54 am cst are the only "published reports" to be found. furthermore, a search of the state ethics board website returns only the letters to councilman myron lawson and bridgett brown both dated 23 october 2007.

next is a wikipedia story. kalb must have culled this story from the town talk website as well. this morning the town talk has a story by mandy m. goodnight captioned "false information about pineville, bolton getting new principals spread online." [screen grab]

what kalb doesnt tell you is that if you go to the wikipedia entry for kalb-tv and click on the "revision history of kalb-tv" tab and then scroll down you will find that on for instance 10 and 19 april 2007 an ip# 12.5.1.207 resolves to a computer registered to ...media general. this would appear to be a violation by media general/kalb of, including but not limited to, wikipedia's neutral point of view policy.

the point of all this is that any reasonable minded person may easily conclude that media general/kalb uses gannett/the town talk original stories for news purposes -- when they want to -- yet how can media general/kalb explain their totally ignoring the 11 december 2007 gannett/the town talk story "traffic study for hospital plan 'comprehensive,' but not 'scientific.' [.rtf] about how the alexandria mayor and his chief of staff, kay michiels, misrepresented a "study" to the alexandria city council and citizenry?

that story was and remains a story of paramount importance to your average alexandrian. the only conclusion one can reach is that media general/kalb choose to blackout reporting on that because it would be detrimental to their corporate pal and major advertiser -- st. francis cabrini hospital.