Toellner Tells it

Bad news coverage means people don't get it

The media coverage of the Parks & Recreation board meeting sure left a lot of people with the wrong message of what happened.

While the media coverage focused on outburst from the crowd of people in support of the dog park, most didn't focus on WHY people were angry. Sure, people were upset that the dog park thing was struck down....but it was the how that angered people.

There was a public meeting scheduled to talk about the dog park. They then took it off the agenda, and replaced it with an amendment to the dog park rules and regulations.  They essentially gave the public 2 hours notice of this change (posting a note on the door of the Parks and Rec building is NOT proper public notification in an electronic age).

Then, there was allowed ZERO discussion on the new amendments -- which were clearly a back-room deal.

Folks, this is a Democracy, and a) not allowing the citizens a voice, b) backroom political deals based on friendships with the park board members and c) not providing proper public notice of meeting agendas all falls against the proper political process.

It's a shame that the media didn't cover this. Only the Kansas City Star made an effort to shine light on this by noting that board President John Fierro didn't explain any of the rational behind the backroom deal to the people who attended the meeting and that their idea of "public notification" was posting a bulletin at the Parks and Rec office. 

Withholding information from public meetings is NOT the way our government should be run.  Whether you side with the dogpark folks or not, EVERYONE should be concerned about backroom handshake deals, and closing out public input. 

And it's a real shame the media didn't focus on these issues.

What the Evening News has Become

Over at the KC Dog Blog, I've been pretty vocal about the media and it's role in doing little more than Fear Mongering.  But last week, a study was released by Pew Research that highlights a secondary affect that the failure of the media, especially local media, to actually educate the public on real issues.

The study asked 23 questions regarding national and state politics.  35% of respondents fell into the "high" knowledge category that could answer 15% of the question correctly.  But here's the interesting part, here is the % of the regular viewers/listeners of the following programs/networks that fell into the high category (keep in mind, 35% would be average):

Daily Show/Colbert Report - 54%

Major Newspaper Websites - 54%

NPR - 51%

Daily Newspaper - 43%

CNN - 41%

Fox News - 35%

Local TV News - 35%

So what's it mean?  Probably a lot of things.  But #1, it means that local TV News does nothing to educate people beyond what the average american knows. It's no secret that the local news is crap, this really dispells their myth that the local news reaches people in the know.

While it could be argued that the Daily Show/Colbert Report (which are comedy programs on Comedy Central, not news programs) only attract viewers who are knowledgable about the issues (the shows really wouldn't be funny to those who are unfamiliar), I think it could also be argued that the two Comedy shows actually contain more news than many news networks like CNN/Fox News that would rather spend entire weeks talking about Anna Nicole Smith or Brittney Spears vs talking about real, world issues.

At least now we know who the local news is catering to...