In April 2007, twelve participants in a tax-cut rally held at the State Capitol in St. Paul filed complaints against WCCO-TV. Footage of their rally had been edited into a feature on WCCO’s Web site entitled “Raw Video: Global Warming Protest on Capitol Hill.” Though the caption that accompanied the video read, “Hundreds of activists gathered on Capitol Hill Saturday to urge Congress to enact an 80 percent cut in carbon dioxide emissions by 2050,” about half of the footage was of the much larger local tax-cut rally.

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A complaint by two Winona State University professors against the Winona Post and Shopper was upheld. The Hatfields complained after a Sept. 6, 2006 story challenged the validity and credibility of a survey prepared by Susan Hatfield to evaluate the performance of Winona School Superintendent Paul Durand.

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Two complaints by the Minneapolis City Council about a KSTP-TV news story that said the city wrongfully demolished a house in the East Phillips neighborhood were upheld by lopsided votes at a Minnesota News Council public hearing.

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A complaint from three Maplewood city council members that a KSTP-TV news story in July inaccurately reported that the council had stalled progress on an area redevelopment plan was narrowly upheld today by the Minnesota News Council. The vote was 6 to 4.

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The Minnesota News Council voted 11-1 to uphold a complaint against WCCO-TV by a St. Paul family who said the station misrepresented them as unable to afford to attend the Minnesota State Fair except on a Bargain Day.

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Complaints against FOX 9 News by the Lions Club of Shell Lake (WI) and by a trust fund set up to help a savagely beaten girl were upheld.

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Law & Politics, a monthly magazine aimed at two niche audiences, published a story in its June/July 2003 issue surveying a variety of bizarre political disputes in three Twin Cities suburbs. The story, “The Day the Strippers Tried to Take Over City Hall,” was a feature intended to amuse readers.

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The News Council voted 15-5 that the Wright County Journal-Press, a weekly newspaper in Buffalo, Minn., was unfair in is coverage of a rape case, even though its stories contained no inaccuracies.

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WCCO-TV, the CBS-owned station in the Twin Cities, broadcast a story on December 9, 2002 suggesting that chickens sold by companies such as Gold’n Plump could be dangerous to eat. One reason: bacteria in chickens treated with antibiotics develop resistance to those drugs, sometimes rendering the same drugs ineffective in treating human beings who get sick from eating those chickens.

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The complaint here is that WCCO-TV was unfair in its story about mold in school walls by singling out Ken Walijarvi, the architect of several of the schools highlighted, and portraying him as a wrongdoer, especially since the story itself stated that the design Walijarvi used was considered the state of the art at the time.

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