WVa paper turns three lawmakers into unpersons

Big Brother would definitely love this:

May 18, 2010 · Last weekend, the Morgantown newspaper The Dominion Post ran a front-page story about the governor signing into law, Erin’s law. But the picture that accompanied the story has turned into a news story of its own.

The law toughens penalties for deadly hit and run car accidents and is named in honor of Erin Keener, a WVU student from Marion County who died in a hit and run accident in 2005.

The Dominion Post decided to remove from the picture three delegates who sponsored Erin’s Law…

You’ve got to go look at the picture, before and after. Shades of Nikolai Yezhov.

And why did the paper do it? Get this: “due to the newspaper’s policy not to publish pictures of candidates running for re-election during the political season.”

I kid you not. Now you know why, during my career in newspapers, I was generally opposed to hard-and-fast rules about what we would run and what we wouldn’t. They are no substitute for what SHOULD be an editor’s most important asset: judgment.

What a classic case of rigid adherence to a simplistic rule leading to a stupid, laughable, unethical action.

This is double-plus ungood, folks.

3 thoughts on “WVa paper turns three lawmakers into unpersons”

  1. Wally Altman

    This is astonishing, especially considering the fact that they had an obvious and ethical solution that met their policy available: don’t run the picture at all.

  2. Brad

    One thing I neglected to mention … no daily newspaper I ever worked at would run such a picture — a static, posed, grip-and-grin shot taken by someone not on the paper’s staff. That’s traditionally the province of weeklies with zero staff that are grateful for any kind of free content.

    Of course, these days daily newspapers, as thin as they are, have so decimated their staffs that they’re less picky about what they publish.

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