Becoming the story

Actually, he'd be serving his readers better by reporting whatever it is the council was trying to discuss behind closed doors, and now is forced to do so in public.

Letting them illegally go into executive session and then reporting it doesn't help the reader much. You never get to hear what is discussed, which is what the reader most wants to know.

I'm with W_B ... you give them a chance to do it the right way, because it better serves your ends. If they choose to break the law anyway, well, now you can report it -- and you can write that they KNOWINGLY broke the law.

 

Actually, I have to admit W-B and Some Guy gave intelligent answers to my question.
I don't cover anything that would include an executive session, so I hadn't thought it completely through.
Still, I think I would have to note that these officials didn't know the law. I think your readers deserve to know they have idiots in charge.

 

I suspect they probably already know.

 

Okie, and I swear to God this is true: I interviewed a councilman the other day about an issue he and the rest of the council approved days earlier. It turns out he had NO IDEA what he voted to approve. He voted for it thinking he was voting for something else.

He actually got into a debate with me about it. I asked him, "Don't you remember - there was an entire discussion about the issue before you voted for it!?" He didn't believe me. I had to refer him to the administrator.

What's funny is he's one of the competent ones ... :

 

Really, with stories like that, it's amazing things aren't worse in this country (and I think they're pretty damn bad).

 

Here's a similar scenario that happened to me the other night.

I was covering a high school girls basketball game where I knew it would be a blowout in favor of the visiting team. I keep my own book as my way of keeping stats.

The visiting team was up by about 14 in the third quarter, and the visiting manager approaches the scorers table during a timeout. Everyone confers, and the scorer puts two points for the visitor on the board. I go down to the official book to see what happened. The scorer says the visiting team has a basket she didn't, and she took their word for it.

I never saw this basket go in. I'm 99 percent sure they didn't score it.

Now, the visiting team ended up winning by 30, so it didn't play a part in the outcome of the game. I used the score on the scoreboard as the official "final" score and, because it made the box add up, used the basket I never saw in the box. Because the score got so lopsided, there was no reason to write about it.

I've felt weird about it ever since. I can't help thinking I should never have added the basket since I didn't see it and am fairly certain it didn't occur. But since the official stats had it, and there was always the chance I somehow missed it, I also didn't feel right leaving it out.

So what say you? In a situation like that, do you go with the official book or go with what you saw?

 

I think you have to print the official score, but I'd do as much checking into it as I could. If two of the (presumably three) books don't show the basket, it probably didn't happen.
If you become certain the basket didn't occur, it would at least make an interesting note.

 

If you count my book as a third, then two of the three didn't show it. The official scorekeeper is usually a teacher who keeps score in the home team's book, so they don't keep one on a bench. When I asked her about the two points, I mentioned that I didn't see a basket and she said, "Yeah, I missed it too." That really set off the alarm bells.

I'm as certain as I can be about there being no basket. I don't think I'd miss two points entirely, especially considering my book has that running score feature at the top, and I find that I'm usually up to speed on all my stats at the end of the game. I certainly don't think both of us would have missed it.

Still, without video to determine one way or another, my book and the official book could have been wrong. I have no way to definitively figure that out. That's why I went with the official scorer's decision, but it felt, and still feels, wrong.

 

i think you have bigger things in life to worry about, dog. it was two points in a 30-point blowout. do yourself a favor and let it go.