Just Making Stuff Up

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Recently, the compassionate conservatives at the Gazette revived a sad local episode from a year ago and thought it was fitting and proper to compare it to another sad story of lives lost and hopes dashed.

Police: Kerr akin to VT killer Excerpt:
If Daniel Kerr hadn't been severely burned in the ……
If the night hadn't unfolded as it did, Kerr might have……
If Kerr had been planning on returning to the university that evening, it's unlikely he would…

Take a very serious and tragic event and stretch into something it never was. This is news in Rock County.

On Saturday the paper published three heart-felt letters from readers who thought the paper exploited the Kerr tragedy. At the end of the third letter appeared this editor’s note explaining how this story was “created.”

JG Excerpt:
Editors Note: The story should have better explained the reason for its timing. The Gazette requested the official records of the Kerr tragedy shortly after the Virginia Tech shootings - after a reader suggested that we might want to look into the similarities. We went to work on the story and completed it as quickly as we could after receiving the records.

What story? A suggestion by a reader? Here, readers are led to believe the police put this story together and the Gazette merely reported on it when it turns out the Gazette found a willing participant in the Milton Police Department to add credibility to a story they literally pulled out of thin air.

The Gazette has been writing stories like these for decades and few complain until it strikes them close to home. That’s the sad part.

Another recent but different story about a drunk driver crashing and dying after being let go by police was another case in point of what “if.” The only difference here is “if” could have done a world of good instead of the increased bloodshed and mayhem conjured up by the Gazette in their recent Kerr revival.
What if police enforced .08 limit? Cops: Nothing would change
This story fell off the planet after that article. Will the Gazette run an anniversary story a year from now? Stay tuned.

Here’s an idea. The Gazette should seriously consider starting a new section in their paper called “What if!?” Here they can carry on with all of their fabricated stories, suppositions, personal attacks, far-fetched speculation and really bad analogies and we would know they just made it up. It would allow them to print the exact same newspaper we get everyday with the very same content, only rearranged and packaged differently. We would get the same follow-up stories on murderers, victims, survivors and other people who weren’t lucky enough to be editors. People could be mocked, minor missteps could be magnified and everyday people having a personal crisis would be publicly tried and convicted in the paper just like they are today. But we could still get month-long stories about new stadiums and fairgrounds along with million dollar gifts if only “if.” We could still get frontpage stories about nasty bugs that never materialized, or “Waco” mayhem when a little barn is demolished…..all in one “What if!?” section. Think about the endless possibilities here. Nothing would change.