Determination
145
Minnesota
News Council
In the Matter of the Complaint of the Minneapolis City Council v. KSTP-TV
October 19, 2006
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.
The complaints said that the story about the demolition process was inaccurate and that the story unfairly identified City Council Member Gary Schiff as having "spearheaded" the demolition. The News Council vote on the first complaint was 16-3, and on the second, 16-3.
The house - designated as condemned - was bought nonetheless by Dan Larson, who has a small business buying, rehabbing and selling homes. Plans he submitted for fixing this house were rejected by the City Council as recommended by the city inspection staff. The staff estimated that proper repairs would cost $240,000 and that Larson was proposing to spend $140,000.
The news story was broadcast on August 23, almost five months after the demolition order from the city, and a month or so after the demolition itself.
The story said that the city had its own plans for the property. Schiff said that when the reporter interviewed him she accused him of conspiring with a developer to clear the way for upscale housing. He said she refused to look at documents that he said would explain the demolition process.
Schiff told the News Council that the city had no plans, it merely dealt with a condemned property in a routine way. The committee he serves on considers three to six demolition cases a month, he said: "We get only the worst of the worst of the worst." He said that the police had received 52 calls to the property in the year past, and that the city staff rated Larson’s work substandard, pointing to Larson’s having covered windows with aluminum siding, for example, in previous projects.
In the news story Schiff told the reporter he had photos of Larson’s other work. At the hearing he said he offered to show them to her, but said she declined to look at them. He said she seemed in a hurry to leave. In a letter to the city communications director, a copy of which was filed with the News Council, the reporter said she had asked to see the photos but was denied access to them.
News Council members with TV reporting experience doubted that the city would deny them, since the photos apparently supported the decision to demolish, and they questioned the reporter’s refusal to take time to see the photos when Schiff mentioned them, since TV reporters always look for pictures, they said, to strengthen their stories.
News Council members noted that news coverage of government has suffered with the decline of beat reporting. Generalists, they said, are just not equipped to deal with the complexities of government processes.
News Council member Karen Boros, a former TV news reporter and now a journalism teacher at the University of St. Thomas, said, "I would be terrified if I were a reporter [given this kind of story to cover] and I didn�t know how things worked at city hall."
Kerri Miller, a former TV reporter and now the host of a Minnesota Public Radio talk show, said, "There were omissions in this story. The reporter had ample opportunity to get more information. The story is misleading, and because it is misleading it is inaccurate.
"Someone calls the station with a tip [that the city is robbing a homeowner of his dream house]" she went on, "and you sit around the newsroom saying, ‘That’s going to be a good story.’ But when you go out to report it you don’t close your eyes. You say, ‘Let’s see those pictures, and where’s the list of things that the city said needed to be done to the house?"
News Council member Lorin Robinson, a former journalism teacher now in public relations at 3M, questioned the framing of the story, saying that it smacked of populism: the city is hurting the little guy, and the TV station is out to protect the little guy. Another member pointed to a line in the narration that said Larson "was trying to build a community, thwarted by its own leaders."
Neil Neddermeyer, a retired deputy sheriff, said, "The story should have been about fact; instead, the reporter made it about passion."
Since the story was broadcast, KSTP has done another story, revealing that the city had failed to mail Larson the required notice that demolition was scheduled. News Council member Reed Anfinson, publisher/editor of the Swift County Monitor-News, in Benson, Minn., said, "After sitting through 20 years of city council meetings and condemnation proceedings, [I can tell you] there’s no way Larson could not have understood his building was going to be torn down."
Larson is suing the city for what he says is its failure to notify him and his mortgage lender of the demolition.
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