Biz journalists not the bad guys

Don Kopriva, the editor of The Business Ledger, a newspaper that covers business in suburban Chicago, writes about how readers don’t understand the role of a newspaper in covering business.

Kopriva wrote, “For example, we sometimes get calls alleging that a company has been unfair to the caller or to a group and what could we do about that? We’re asked to tell the ‘truth’ about so-and-so, but one man’s truth is another man’s lie, and when it gets down to ‘he said, she said,’ then the truth may not be what someone wants to hear. Sadly, we can do little with limited reportorial resources. Other people seem to think that we should run whatever story they want, regardless of whether not it has anything to do with suburban business coverage.

“Protecting the public’s right to know is one of the tenets of our secular faith, the U.S. Constitution. Freedom of the press is something we should treasure every day along with freedom of speech.

“Newspapers, while hardly perfect, still inform and entertain. So why all the hate?”

Read more here.