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.
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.
The Minnesota News Council voted to deny complaints by Rep. Arlon Lindner (R-Corcoran) that the Star Tribune and the Associated Press had unfairly covered the controversy about his bill to remove sexual orientation as a protected class under the state’s human rights act.
The Brooklyn Center/Brooklyn Park Sun-Post ran an article on July 24 about the Osseo school board’s evaluation of its superintendent of schools. Judy Peterzen is the chair of the school board. She complained that the article was unfair to her, that it failed to explain a neighboring school board’s policy and that it failed to summarize the board’s evaluation in detail. She also complained that her follow-up letter-to-the-editor was unfairly edited.
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.
On March 15, 2002, the Star Tribune published a news story about Department of Administration officials who questioned MnDOT’s legal and ethical behavior in awarding contracts for work on the intersection of Hwys. 55 and 62, associated with the light-rail project. An Administration official, Kent Allin, was quoted as saying, “The culture of MnDOT is to act the bully, throw one’s weight around, villainize anybody who stands in your way and not worry about wasting tax dollars.”
James Keating was city treasurer in Grant, MN when $120,000 worth of assessment checks went missing. The Pioneer Press ran a story on November 15, 2001, when the Grant City Council instituted a deadline for finding the checks. The story stated that Keating would pick up the checks or have them delivered. It also quoted a City Council member saying that Keating was instructed to turn over deposit slips to the clerk, but he didn’t. Keating thought that the article should have explained that the acting city clerk, who was supposed to give him the checks, was an untrained temporary employee who never delivered them. The reporter did not contact Keating for that story. Another story ran on November 17th. For this story the reporter tried to contact Keating at his home, leaving a message with her pager number on his home machine. She said she thought he was out of the office looking for the checks, and so did not try to contact him there. Keating didn’t get back to the reporter, thinking it was too late.
The Ely City Council held a closed meeting in April to discuss its ongoing negotiations with the EPA over violations for which city was being fined. The City Council closed the meeting citing the need for a discussion of potential litigation strategy, currently an exception under Minnesota’s open meeting law. The City Council said it was protecting the concerns of the citizens by keeping the discussion of strategy confidential. The Ely Echo, one of the two newspaper’s in town, published an account of the meeting in the following week’s paper. The paper declined to respond to the city’s inquiry about the source of the article. The paper also said it was protecting the taxpayers’ interests by keeping them informed about the actions of the City Council.
Participants included the spokesman for the complainants, Larry Miller, a manufacturing quality manager from Big Lake, and Bruce Gordon, director of communications for the Department of Commerce (DOC), as a witness for the complainants. Gary Meyer, editor and publisher of The West Sherburne Tribune, submitted a written response to the complaint, but did not attend the hearing. The hearing took place at the Ramsey County Library in Roseville.
The Winona Post ran an editorial critical of the practices of the Winona County Board of Commissioners following a committee of the board meeting on January 9, 2001. After reading an incorrect report in the Winona Daily News that said the board had decided to buy a former school building in an effort to recover lost office space after a courthouse flood, the Post’s editor called the board and obtained a denial of the report. The editor concluded that if such a decision had been made, it would have to have been at an illegal meeting.