December 1, 2006

Strike Two: Tennessean Gets Gas Tax Story Wrong

It's been a bad couple of days for the credibility of The Tennessean - and also not a very good couple of days for many of Tennessee's conservative political bloggers, who blindly accepted the newspaper's account of two completely different news stories as accurate in both content and context.

Yesterday, I revealed how The Tennessean took some remarks by Lipscomb University professor Dr. Lee Camp grossly out of context - and how a number of conservative political bloggers and commenters writing on the paper's website and the blogs blindly believed - wrongly - that the The Tennessean had gotten the story right.

Today, NashvillePost.com has posted an important story by reporter Ken Whitehouse detailing how The Tennessean misrepresented the views of state Sen. Mark Norris, R-Collierville, in a story published Thursday, and made it appear that the senator from the suburbs of Memphis was proposing a new kind of gas tax scheme which would have the government tracking how many miles Tennesseans drive via GPS tracking devices in their cars.

The story, State Senator disputes Tennessean reports, is so important that NashvillePost.com has made it available for free on the usually subscription-only website.

Read it and you'll learn how The Tennessean not only got the story wrong, it has failed to keep its promises to the senator to correct the record. Instead of publishing a correction or retraction, the paper today is portraying Sen. Norris as "backtracking" on a proposal that he never made in the first place.

Here is an excerpt of Whitehouse's story:

Norris, chairman of the Senate Transportation Committee, tells NashvillePost.com that he and his staff have worked exstensively the past few weeks trying to bring Tennessean reporter Kate Howard up to speed on transportation issues. Howard, who just recently moved into the state, has been dubbed "Ms. Beep" by the Gannett-owned paper and is slated to be its full time transportation reporter.

Norris tells NashvillePost.com that he and his staff met with The Tennessean's editorial staff and Howard yesterday in an attempt to clear up matter, hoping for clarification of his position in today's paper. Instead, he says, today's article makes it appear that he is backtracking on an issue due to pressure from readers of the daily paper.

"This issue was never on the table," Norris insists. "In a long conversation with Howard, I was giving her examples of other types of user fees after I said I was against raising the gas tax and against establishing tolls on top of a gas tax that the Bredesen administration is not even using. The transportation trust fund needs to be repaid by the administration out of existing revenues."

As a former transportation beat reporter for Nashville Business Journal (in the early 1990s), I know that issues like that can be eye-glazingly boring despite their importance. A young reporter like Kate Howard who is new to town, new to The Tennessean, and new to the transportation beat might easily be attracted instead to the front-page possibilities of "breaking news" that a senator is proposing a sure-to-be-controversial new gas tax scheme. But not every exciting story is a true story: Kate Howard wrote fiction. And the paper's editors so far are refusing to make it right.

Norris feels the meeting yesterday was fruitless. "I asked for a retraction," he says. "They promised a correction, and I got neither."

It's interesting that the paper ran the inaccurate Norris story on the same day that it launched reporter Kate Howard's new transportation issues column and blog. Perhaps she'll address the issues raised by the NashvillePost.com report on her blog.

Meanwhile, I'll rephrase what I wrote yesterday to Tennessee's political bloggers - and talk radio hosts - who were too quick to jump on Dr. Camp rather than first find out if The Tennessean story was accurate, and also showed the same over-reaction to the Norris gas tax story, jumping on Sen. Norris and the per-mile tax idea without questioning whether the paper's story was accurate.

C'mon, guys and gals: You don't trust The Tennessean on a regular basis to get the facts right or to represent conservative viewpoints and conservative politicians accurately when it comes to a variety of issues, yet you blindly accepted their story about Sen. Norris and the gas tax yesterday as the truth. You ought to know better.

Like you, I took immediate offense at the idea of a per-mile gas tax scheme involving the state tracking my driving via GPS monitors. Like you, I was surprised to read that the idea was coming from a conservative Republican state Senator previously known as a friend of taxpayers and a foe of new and/or higher taxes when I read Sen. Norris' alleged remarks as quoted by The Tennessean yesterday. But given the paper's consistent support for higher taxes, it occurred to me that the paper's story may reflect its point-of-view more than Sen. Norris' - or that the reporter simply may have misunderstood the issue. So, I held my fire. (Admittedly, it helped that I was busy deconstructing the paper's destructively misleading story about Dr. Camp - I didn't have time to blog about Sen. Norris and the gas tax - but I assure you I wasn't going to write about Sen. Norris and the gas tax until I at least emailed him for clarification and asked if he really intended to file such legislation. In short, I was going to do what Tennessean reporter Kate Howard failed to do - ask Sen. Norris to clarify his remarks so that I could report and comment on the actual truth.)

As for The Tennessean, it has some serious 'splaining to do, though it looks as if the paper's editors are chosing to hunker down and ignore the questions of credibility and competence swirling around two of its big stories. NashvillePost.com reports that the paper's editor declined to comment on Norris' claims.

Through his secretary, Tennessean editor Mark Silverman told NashvillePost.com that he would have no comment on the assertions by Norris. He also did not respond to a question about the unusual treatment of yesterday's story on the newspaper's website: It was the lead item on the site Thursday morning, but by late afternoon all reference to it had been removed from the homepage.

Early this morning I emailed Tennessean editor Mark Silverman, managing editor Meg Downey, editorial page editor (and former "reader editor") John Gibson, and reporter Anita Wadhwani seeking information regarding the story the paper published about Dr. Camp on Wednesday. Here is text of the the email:

To: Mark Silverman, Meg Downey, John Gibson, Anita Wadhwani,

Editors of The Tennessean:

I am a former full-time journalist (including a mid-1990s stint at The Tennessean) and I now regularly write about media issues on my blog, www.billhobbs.com.

I have been writing about reporter Anita Wadhwani's story about the Lipscomb University interfaith gathering and Dr. Lee Camp's reported remarks, and the reaction to and fallout from that story. You can see my main post here.

Questions are being asked about the accuracy of the reporter's quotation of Dr. Camp, both in wording and context - and both Dr. Camp and the paper and Ms. Wadhwani's credibility are all coming under fire.

I am writing you to request a copy of Ms. Wadhwani's story as she wrote it and filed it, before it was edited for publication. That would help clarify how Ms. Wadhwani covered the event. I am addressing this request to all three of you, and directly to Ms. Wadhwani, because the paper currently has no "reader editor" or reader advocate to whom to send this request.

Also, the Lipscomb event was several hours long. Some readers commenting on your website allege that Ms. Wadhwani was not even at the event. Could you clarify how long Ms. Wadhwani was in attendance at the event, and if she was not there for the entire event, for which portions or time-period she was there?

Bill Hobbs
www.billhobbs.com

Meanwhile, the paper's "reader editor" slot goes unfilled.

Update: ACK writes: "This and the Camp controversy calls into serious question the reporting of the Tennessean. Not a good start for the new editorial regime, I don't think."

Nope, not a good start at all.

Update: Adam Groves apologizes to his readers for believing The Tennessean:

We here at TPB sincerely apologize to Senator Norris for any confusion we may have caused among our readership - and apologize to you the readers for getting it wrong. We sincerely hope the Tenenssean issues a similar statement.