Determination
139
Minnesota
News Council
In the Matter of the Complaint of
The Shell Lake Lions & Miranda Paffel Trust v. KMSP-TV
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.
Three news stories broadcast in February generated moral outrage among thousands of viewers who learned from the reports that only a tiny percentage of the more than $66,000 raised to help the girl had been disbursed by the trust. The Lions Club organized a fundraiser 13 years ago after Miranda Paffel was beaten, and then handed the proceeds over to a trust.
News Council members agreed that the stories created the false impression that the Lions Club controls the trust fund. It does not. Lions member Rudy Kessler said that the bad publicity has harmed the ability of his and other Lions clubs to raise funds for charitable causes.
The chairman of the trust, William Taubman, and the man who wrote the trust, Eugene Harrington, were members of the Lions Club. Harrington later became a judge and oversaw the trust — a conflict of interest revealed by the FOX 9 story, which led him to transfer oversight to another judge.
The News Council voted 14 to 5 that the stories were inflammatory in their treatment of the Paffel Trust and the Lions Club, portraying them as stingy and corrupt and failing to explore the trust’s reasons for still holding onto more than $57,000 intended to aid Ms. Paffel’s recovery.
Taubman said the reporter knew that the trust had reservations about disbursing a lot of the funds because of documented dysfunction in Ms. Paffel’s family and should have pursued that angle to explain why funds have been withheld. He said he wanted to “travel the high road” by not making public comments about the family in his on-camera interview. But after the FOX 9 stories appeared, he said he was “taking the gloves off” to reveal what public records show about past abuse of Ms. Paffel in her home.
At a public hearing at the Minnesota History Center in St. Paul, FOX 9 News Director Ted Canova told the News Council that Taubman had every opportunity to tell the reporter why the trustees had decided to withhold funds, and that the station reported exactly what he and another trustee said: that the trustees thought the family should use funds for education and job training for the young woman, now 22.
Hundreds of donors who saw the news reports angrily wrote e-mails that they wanted their money given directly to Ms. Paffel and not controlled by the trust.
Canova said the station pursued the story because the trust provided that if the funds were not disbursed to Ms. Paffel they would go to local charitable organizations, including the Lions. That was worth investigation, he said, because the Lions raised so much of the money and a Lions member wrote and oversaw the trust. Taubman said in the story that the trust would never allow funds to go to the Lions, but would divert them to other charitable causes.
News Council members asked about the station’s motivation in doing the stories, which played a prominent part in a ratings-measurement period. Canova responded:
“It sounds like sensationalism, February sweeps, always a great criticism. But this story came out of the raging curiosity of a reporter who covered the original story 13 years ago.”
Taubman disputed that view. He said the reporter had done a story on Ms. Paffel in 1996 and learned then of the unsavory details that had raised the trust fund’s concerns.
The News Council, by an 18-1 vote, upheld a complaint that the FOX 9 report inaccurately said that two Lions, not one, were trustees of the fund, thus shoring up the view that the Lions Club was controlling the trust. Canova said the station relied upon an official court document, the petition asking for approval of formation of the trust. A Council member pointed out that a more thorough search would have discovered the actual trust document, listing the members. Only one, Taubman, was a Lions Club member.
Two features of the reports drew special attention from Council members. One was footage of the Lions Club fundraiser 13 years ago and footage of a contemporary Lions Club meeting, which in the absence of pictures of a Paffel trust meeting, they said, pointed to the Lions as controlling the funds.
Another was a very long pause in Taubman’s interview, where he was asked why the trust was not disbursing the funds, and he thought about his answer for many seconds before expressing the trust’s reservations about the family. That question was shown again in a follow-up report, with a long pause again, but the story cut away to another scene before his answer. Council members thought that technique unfairly made Taubman look bad.
News Council Board Chairman John Finnegan commended Canova and FOX 9 for taking part in the hearing and said they were setting a good example for other TV stations in making themselves accountable.
Read Determination 140
Back
to Main Determination Index
Back
to News Council Main Page
Want
to comment? Send a message
to the News Council.
