Background: Early in 2000, Jerry Klema and Pat Novacek, developers, proposed building a “senior foster home” (an assisted living facility). Pat Novacek owned a home on one lot and wanted to expand it onto the lot next to his. He requested a conditional-use waiver to do so. He then bought three lots directly behind his two and requested that the city rezone those lots from R1 to R2 to allow up to 16 residents.

When neighbors were notified of the rezoning request, they spoke with the developer at a neighborhood meeting. Dr. Sallberg said many neighbors were dissatisfied with the answers of the developer; they believed he had not paid adequate attention to parking and traffic issues and they were concerned that the building being proposed for the back lots would look institutional. They were also concerned about what would happen to the two residences – each having an unusually large number of bedrooms – when it came time to resell them.

Neighbors attended the Monday, March 6 planning commission meeting, at which the developers made their rezoning request. The commission recommended that the city council deny the request. Neighbors then attended the city council meeting that same evening. They again voiced their concerns. The city council sent the matter back to the planning commission.

A news story about the council meeting that appeared in the Saturday paper, March 11, said the following:

In the most attended portion of the regular meeting of the City Council, Jerry Klema and Pat Novacek appeared to request a conditional use permit for changing a residential home into a senior citizen adult foster care facility serving six or less people.

Earlier in the day, the Planning Commission had met and recommended that the City Council deny the conditional use permit.

In attendance were a number of homeowners who were fairly unanimous in their opposition. Their major objections were their concerns about increased traffic and parking concerns.

Afterwards, Jerry Klema was disappointed.

“I didn’t anticipate this at all,” he said. “I though it would be welcomed because it’s a good idea.

” My neighbors are saying they are not against it somewhere in Roseau, but not in their backyard.”

Klema mentioned that he and Pat Novacek weren’t asking to have this residence rezoned.

“I think these things have to be assimilated into a community,” he said. “If not here, where?”

Two weeks later, on March 25, the reporter, Jeff Olsen wrote a satirical column, which included the following:

Mama will make a big splash in the suburb of Klema where, who knows, maybe they don’t want old people out on the street because they’ll scare the little children.

I missed the Roseau City Council meeting on Tuesday evening because I don’t like to waste my time listening to people bitch and complain.

Here in Roseau, the rallying cry was to deny these old people, whose only fault was to need a place to hang their hat and to be treated with respect.

And now Mama is talking of her own movement.

She wants to relocate up here. She told me to call these people, the Novaceks, because she has money to burn and can live in a fancy neighborhood with rich neighbors like dentists and school teachers.

“Didn’t you say there was a dentist in the neighborhood?” Mama asked, mentioning that once she moves up here, she will be stopping by to visit this nice young man, as she called him.

On Tuesday evening, she was already looking out for her future new neighbors, the same ones who wanted to exclude an old relic like her from their nice neighborhood.

Complaint: Dr. Sallberg complained that:

1. The Times-Region news story of March 11 was inaccurate in reporting that the developer did not ask for a rezoning.

2. The news story was biased in not including comment from the residents who objected to the rezoning;

3. The column of March 25 unfairly created a distorted impression of Dr. Sallberg and those who shared his objections to the rezoning.

(A fourth complaint, about the editing of a letter to the editor, was not heard by the Council. The editor said the two parties had agreed to the editing in question.)

At the hearing, the following question was, with the agreement of both parties:

4. Did the opinions expressed in the column fall within the latitude given to columnists?

Response: Publisher/editor Jodi Driscoll wrote to the Council: “While no reporter for the newspaper was able to attend the council meeting on the proposed senior housing facility, due to competing demands on staff time, Olsen, of our staff, contacted Mayor Jeff Pelowski and a couple of other people who were at the meeting about what had occurred. This is a common practice for smaller newspapers. We feel our news story was substantially accurate.”

“As far as the column Olsen wrote, it was obviously expressing a highly personal view and was clearly not presented as a news story or even an editorial. In such columns, the writer is typically allowed – and should be – a wide latitude of expression. I also consulted with (an attorney) who assured me, in his opinion, Olsen did not libel Dr. Sallberg.

“Dr. Sallberg was not identified by name in the column.

“After the column appeared, Dr. Sallberg was indeed upset, so I told him he could write a letter to the editor to present his side with respect to what he felt were the facts. Dr. Sallberg did this. There were a couple of minor changes to the letter that

Discussion: Dr. Sallberg charged that the paper did not make a reasonable attempt to discern the facts about the rezoning request, including the fact that a request had been made. He provided the News Council with a copy of it. “Truthfulness and accuracy are not tied to (the size of a paper’s) circulation, to whether a paper is a daily or a weekly,” he said.

A Council member tried to clarify the exact nature of the rezoning request and the number of people the two (or possibly more) buildings were intended to house. Numbers ranged from six in each facility, up to total of 31. While the news story quoted the developers’ plans for six, Sallberg said the neighbors had received various notices from the city that led them to believe it could be up to 31 residents and that at a different meeting the developers had said they might build more than one additional building.

“That was our concern,” said Sallberg. “No one had thought about parking at all.”

Editor Driscoll said the paper had not seen the rezoning request document and did not attend planning commission meetings or informal neighborhood meeting, but that it did attend all city council meetings. She said it missed only one meeting – March 6 – because the reporter who covered city hall was having surgery.

Driscoll pointed out that the story did not say there was no rezoning request; it simply quoted the developer saying that. Driscoll was asked if she believed there were any factual errors in the news story. She said Klema may not have known of the rezoning request, so while it may not have been a true statement, it was what he believed to be true.

She said the paper had accurately reported the rezoning request in both an earlier and a later story (covered by the regular reporter). A council member asked her why, if the paper knew the facts – that there was a rezoning request and that the number of residents proposed was more than the six quoted – it hadn’t checked the story against its earlier story? Driscoll said that if she could do it over again, she would check the Olsen story against earlier Times-Region stories for accuracy.

Council members asked how the statement got into the news story unchallenged when a previous story showed it to be untrue. They asked Driscoll if she edited the news story. Driscoll said she doesn’t edit the stories of either reporter because they have been writing for the paper for many years. “I read them over,” she said.

Driscoll was asked if she had considered publishing a correction. She said she wouldn’t have had a problem with doing that, but Sallberg wanted a letter to the editor, so that’s what she did.

Media member Benno Groeneveld said, “Instead of saying you don’t have a problem with publishing a correction, why don’t you say, “I will insist on publishing a correction if I know we’ve been wrong, to enhance our credibility?’”

Sallberg complained that the reporter did not ask any neighbors for their perspective, but spoke only to the mayor and the developer and got a a one-sided view.

Driscoll said the story accurately reported that the neighbors were concerned with traffic and parking and that a later story (not submitted ot the Council) quoted Sallberg and another neighbor (after Sallberg had complained about the March 11 story).

Council members asked Sallberg if he was satisfied after he was quoted in the follow-up story. Sallberg said he was, until he turned the page and read Olsen’s column.

Sallberg acknowledged that he’s not named in the column, but said that since there are only two dentists in Roseau and he’s the only one who lives in the Klema Addition, and his wife is a teacher, that that was sufficient identification for a significant number of readers. Sallberg felt he was seriously misrepresented in the column as someone who is anti-elderly, not trustworthy and not nice.

Sallberg said he appreciated that columnists are given latitude in the opinions they express, but asked “How far does latitude go? I’m a private citizen. Some of the statements that were made are not true.”

Driscoll was asked if she read Olsen’s column before publishing it. She said she did and that she was concerned enough about it to fax a copy to an attorney for comment. She was assured that it was not libelous, although the attorney advised her to remove some sentences, which she did.

Driscoll was asked if she was concerned that a reporter wrote that he didn’t want to go to a meeting that he was supposed to be reporting on. She said she wasn’t concerned, that there are parts of everyone’s job that they don’t like and he was just being honest.

A council member asked if Driscoll would say the characterization of the neighbors was fair; she said she would not, but that it was Olsen’s truthful opinion. A council member asked if she was bothered by the fact that the column was based on information that wasn’t accurate. She said she neither agreed, nor disagreed; that it was purely his opinion.

Driscoll was asked if she would do anything else differently next time. She said she now includes a statement on the opinion page that the opinions expressed are those of the writer, not the paper or its management.

After the column, in response to Sallberg’s complaints, Driscoll said she offered to publish a letter to the editor. It was published on April 1, with a box on page one to draw attention to it (the original story had appeared on page one). 

Deliberation: Council member Jon Schroeder, former owner and editor of a small-town paper, commiserated with the challenges of an editor who is short-staffed. “You have writers who’ve been writing a long time, it’s hard to edit them. It’s a challenge. I’ve also had experience with very volatile columnists, and yes, they have a right to say what they want to say, but there is a basic level of accuracy and sometimes you have to reign them in, to bring them back to the facts.”

“You have editorial control,” he reminded Driscoll.

Driscoll agreed, and said that’s why she had asked a lawyer for help.

Media member Don Shelby said the paper did what was proper by publishing the letter to the editor and publishing correct information in follow-up stories, but he was still bothered that the editor didn’t check the news story for accuracy against previous stories, which would have caught the error.

“Fact-checking was even more important here,” said Schroeder, “because you didn’t have anyone covering the meeting and you were using a substitute reporter to cover a story he hadn’t previously covered. You were working from a real disadvantage and that should lead to caution. Having a flamboyant columnist should also lead to fact-checking.”

He said that, after the fact, the paper had done as good a job as it could.

Some Council members expressed concern about the same person writing both a news story and an opinion piece, but acknowledged how difficult it is for a small-town paper to keep the firewall between those two functions. Driscoll pointed out that the stories appeared in separate issues of the paper and said she would not have allowed him to write a news story and a column about the same thing in the same issue.

Several Council members said that while the column was not libelous, it went over the edge, and they believed the problem lay with the news story. “Columns must be based on verifiable and accurate facts,” said Shelby. “The problem here is that it was based on a false presumption.”

The Vote:
1. On the complaint that the Roseau Times-Region news story was inaccurate:

Voting to uphold the complaint: Cleary, Diaz, Groeneveld, Hage, Johnson, Keller, Kuusisto, Neddermeyer, Reister, Schroeder, Shelby, Shulstad, Stauffer, Williams, 
Voting to deny the complaint: Tilley
Abstain: Lopez
Presiding: Stringer

2. On the complaint that the Roseau Times-Region news story was biased in not including comment from the residents who objected to the rezoning:

Voting to uphold the complaint: Cleary, Groeneveld, Hage, Johnson, Keller, Kuusisto, Neddermeyer, Reister, Schroeder, Shulstad, Stauffer, Williams, 
Voting to deny the complaint: Diaz, Lopez, Shelby, Tilley
Presiding: Stringer

3. On the complaint that the Roseau Times-Region column of March 25 unfairly created a distorted impression of Dr. Sallberg and those who shared his objections to the rezoning:

Voting to uphold the complaint: Groeneveld, Keller, Kuusisto, Neddermeyer, Reister, Shelby, Shulstad, Stauffer, Tilley, Williams
Voting to deny the complaint: Diaz, Cleary, Hage, Johnson, Lopez, Schroeder
Presiding: Stringer

4. Did the opinions expressed in the March 25 column fall within the latitude given to columnists? 

Yes: Cleary, Diaz, Groeneveld, Hage, Lopez, Schroeder, Stauffer, Williams
No: Johnson, Keller, Kuusisto, Neddermeyer, Reister, Shelby, Shulstad, Tilley
Presiding: Stringer

Council Members’ Amplifications on Votes:

Questions 1 and 2:
Dissenting Opinion (Tilley): I voted to deny both question one and two because, while it’s true that the developers were asking for a rezoning, and technically the article is inaccurate, Ms. Driscoll offered an explanation and a remedy. She offered both a long letter to the editor by Dr. Sallberg and a follow-up story with a fuller explanation of the story. I wish Ms. Driscoll had also printed a short, simple correction, but I believe she was acting in good faith and offered a reasonable remedy.

Questions 3 and 4
Dissenting Opinion: (Hage) In this case, the column probably wasn’t fair to the nuances of Sallberg’s opposition: he accepted a small assisted-living facility, but opposed three big ones. But in these not-in-my-back-yard cases, opponents always present themselves as open-minded, so to express skepticism about their motives seems to me to fall within the range of fair comment.

Affirming Opinion: (Tilley) I am very disturbed that Mr. Olsen’s column and his opinion of Dr. Sallberg and other residents was based on false information. An opinion about a community disagreement is inherently flawed and unfair when it is based on false information.

(Stauffer) Columnists have a right to express themselves forthrightly on controversial matters, and to do so with parody, irony and exaggeration. The problem lay in the news story, on which the column was based.