Monday, August 13, 2012

I took a call from a guy today who said he didn't rape his daughter


I took a call from a guy today who said he didn't rape his daughter.

Now you know the kind of calls newspaper editors get.

Not always pretty. Not always pleasant. Hard to say if they're real.

This man wanted to know if we wanted to do a story about a wrongly accused person who was going to prison and whose life and reputation would be basically ended because prosecutors were charging him with said crime.

I told him we follow these kinds of stories through official court actions. If there's a trial, we would report the defense's case.

We don't however, sit down with those accused and try to do what it takes investigators, prosecutors and defense lawyers hundreds of hours to do: determine a verdict.

We wouldn't have the resources nor the desire, nor is it our purpose, to be judge, jury and jailer.

Still, for some reason he must have thought the newspaper could help.

It's not unheard of that people are falsely charged with a crime. For all I know, he may be innocent.

And if he is, the news will be: He was charged with a crime. A heinous crime perhaps. And he was acquitted.

We always report the verdict. An if he's innocent, that gets in the newspaper.

In the end, we'd be willing to tell his side of it, but we we're going to do the justice system's job. He didn't seem satisfied with this answer.

He said never mind and hung up.



Tuesday, August 7, 2012

Naked bean bagger escaped identification


Many people I talk to say they would rather not admit to some of the things they did in college or when they were young.

I suspect that will be the case with the "Naked bean bagger" we wrote a story about a few weeks ago.

Police were called by neighbors who reported the young gent was playing a game of outdoor bean bag, or "corn hole" by some, in his birthday suit.

The original story is better than I can tell it, so if you hadn't seen it, here it is.

Suffice it to say, the gent attempted to hide from police, leaving his clothes, and importantly his I.D., behind. The police showed up but couldn't get him to answer the door. They thus secured his clothes and I.D. as "evidence."

In the news business, the story of the "Naked bean bagger" is what we call a bona fide "talker." It's a story that is not terribly important in the scheme of things. It's certainly not a public safety hazard or crime spree, but it is nonetheless, something we know from all our Google web analytics will drive traffic at our website through the roof.

It will bury the needle on our "Chartbeat," a service we subscribe to that measures activity on our website in real time.

We were not disappointed. With a little help from the nationally known weird news website Fark.com, that story generated about 70,000 page views. Fark seeks weird news from websites and then creates a link from their website to the news website.

Fark also provides a bit of commentary on just how funny a story might be.

Of our story, the website said "Headline about police responding to naked bean bag game is okay, but could have been true Fark gold if they'd used the other name the article gives for the game"

Our headline: "Naked bean bag game turns into hide and seek with suspect."
Fark's suggested head for "gold status" "Naked corn hole game turns into hide and seek with suspect"
 
Fark has thousands of followers to catch all the weird news from around the country and so when you are "farked" you get a lot of traffic to your website.

The story and all the details were part of the public record. That means name of person, address is included.

However, we chose not to name the young man in a good-hearted attempt to protect him from embarrassment. He's not really a criminal the public needs to fear, at least in our minds. In the news business, there's not a compelling reason to name him.

We suspect there may have been some alcohol involved here and it was an awfully hot day, in the young man's defense.

We know people know who this young man and is and it's probably all over someone's Twitter account, but we try to give people the benefit of the doubt.

We here at The Free Press were all young once too.






Monday, August 6, 2012

Violence, white supremacy and the American mindset


Another day, another shooting.

Random acts of violence seem to be occurring on a regular basis recently, and once again, the country asks itself what are people thinking in the wake of the murder of six Sikh church goers in Milwaukee, by  a white supremacist.

Well, these perpetrators are obviously not thinking very much, and if they are, they've somehow logically concluded that hate is a legitimate mindset and violence is a legitimate solution.

I always ask myself: "How did they get this way."

You can go through the list of usual suspects. Bad parents, bad neighborhoods, bad friends, bad education, society in general, genetics.

But it's worth considering given that most babies don't start out violent. Most kids don't start out violent. Somewhere along the way, something happened that helped reinforce the idea that violence worked as a coping mechanism.

And there's not much one can do about any of the above in any kind systematic way.

Small things can be done along the way. Kids can be taught tolerance at school. They can be taught to settle conflict without violence, without bullying.

But at some point, and this is the scary part, the volume of at-risk kids overwhelms the system. More fall through the cracks. They end up in groups like the white supremacists.

At the growth in at-risk kids to a society that seems to be less willing to deal with them year after year, only building more penitentiaries.

We won't stop crazy incidents like those in Milwaukee or Aurora, Colo., with any program. But we've got to have solutions in place that at least reduce the risk of more and more people falling through the cracks.

The odds will only get worse if we don't.



Thursday, August 2, 2012

Would you like some ethanol with your meal?


I covered farming when crop prices were never above cost and always too low.

As years went on, ethanol, of course, was heralded as the savior for low corn prices. In the ensuring decade or so, it worked like a charm. Market prices for corn were solid, and the government subsidies went down.

Now, apparently, we think ethanol is the culprit for corn prices being too high. And we want the government to fix that too.

Where are we? 1984. George Orwell would be proud of how good has become bad and bad has become good. Unispeak reins.

Livestock groups have corralled some lawmakers into asking the EPA to grant an exception to the ethanol mandate in fuel, meaning less ethanol would be made and less corn used, thereby lowering the prices for livestock producers who buy corn for feed.

Some say high corn prices are killing the livestock industry and companies that make and sell meat.

Of course, the corn industry and ethanol promotion groups argue the waiver should not be granted and the market should be allowed to work.

The first government policy on ethanol worked. It became an industry that consumed millions of bushels of corn, now almost 40 percent of U.S. domestic production.

Why is this a problem?

The proposed new government policy aims to turn back the one that actually worked.

The livestock industry should like, uh, buck up, and pay higher prices or reduce their consumption, kind of like the rest of us have to do when prices get high.

It's called the free market system.