Thursday, October 18, 2007

Schutze vs Blow, Garrison vs Aguilar

This week, a great double bill.

Steve Blow of The Dallas Morning News challenged Jim Schutze of The Observer about his reporting on the Trinity River vote. It looks like the cat fight has pretty much settled down. From this vantage point, I'd call it a draw. Jim Schutze didn't dig deep enough to find out that TDMN did, in fact, report on Dr Robert Bea and his study of the New Orleans levee system. Schutze also exaggerated the land ownership of Hunt and Crow in a very specific warehouse district set to benefit from the Trinity project. On the other hand, Steve Blow showed shocking unprofessionalism by suggesting Schutze should have exploited his wife's employment at the newspaper to do his digging for him into the newspaper's own private archives. And, although Steve Blow is hardly responsible for it, the TDMN's sadly lacking search engine (both the public and private versions) makes all TDMN employees look bad.

The other fight on this week's card was no contest. It was a smackdown by FrontBurner's Trey Garrison of Fox 4's Rebecca Aguilar over her confrontation of a homeowner who shot and killed two burglars in three weeks. Her story was an irritating combination of ambush journalism and crime beat reporting, which now is a staple of local television news. In this case, it was the reporter who ended up down for the count. Good job, Trey, really. Now, if you can get the producer and station manager ashcanned, too, you'll deserve a Katie Award. On second thought, maybe the tarnished Katie Award is better suited for Rebecca Aguilar and Fox 4. Disgusting.

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