Inaccurate reporting

On Feb. 24, 2009, the Tribune printed a story titled “Some NMC staff were improperly terminated.” In the first sentence of the story, the reporter wrote “Rep. Heinz Hofschneider disclosed yesterday the names of personnel who, according to him, were improperly terminated by the Northern Marianas College, resulting in the institution settling cases for thousands of dollars.”

In the second sentence, the reporter wrote, “Hofschneider, in a letter to NMC president Dr. Carmen Fernandez on Friday, said that serious management issues threaten to undermine NMC’s ability to provide education according to the guidelines provided by a formal accreditation process.”

The newspaper allowed its reporter to make a false statement in its lead sentence and link it to a true fact in its next sentence giving the reader the impression that the article is true when the article is full of deliberately misleading and outright false statements. The Tribune published a piece that identifies certain individuals as lacking qualifications for the jobs they hold and pins this on Rep. Hofschneider. But the newspaper did not get those names from Rep. Heinz S. Hofschneider; the reporter used an anonymous two-page document that was provided to the newspaper, but falsely suggests that the details were provided by Hofschneider.

This disclosure hurt people who could end up being completely innocent for no reason whatsoever.

The facts are Rep. Heinz S. Hofschneider did write a letter to NMC president Carmen Fernandez expressing his concern over problems brewing at the college. There is no mention of any person in this letter and there were no revelations either.

There really is no place in any community for this degree of disregard in the media. Innocent people can get hurt. This is why there are basic rules in journalism. The reporter deliberately printed a story mixing anonymous material with a letter and represents that the letter states what is in the anonymous material. That is plain wrong and false.

This is an election year and there are some, maybe at the college or outside of the college, who have taken advantage of this situation and hurt people in the process. In this election, let’s try to avoid getting nasty. There are real issues to fight over, but people should stick to the facts, and this is especially true of newspapers.

Let me say that I support Heinz S. Hofschneider and Arnold I. Palacios in this gubernatorial election, and that I have family and friends who were adversely affected by the Tribune story. Let’s fight hard on issues, let’s not get nasty or disrespectful.