I was fascinated when b!X posted this report on Commissioner Francesconi’s advertisement, in which Commissioner Francesconi alleged that Tom Potter, when chief, reinstated a police officer who had shot a suspect 23 times. Then b!X followed his first report up with another on the treatment that KOIN news had given the story, in which KOIN basically took what the Francesconi campaign had said as fact.
The gist of the controversy is that (1) Mr. Potter wasn’t chief of police when the officer was reinstated, (2) KOIN is wrongly reporting that he was, and (3) KOIN won’t check the facts.
As best as I can tell, the facts are these. In 1992, an officer was accused of using excessive force against a suspect. Charles Moose, then a police captain, found that the officer had used excessive force and wanted the officer suspended. Chief Potter disagreed and reinstated the officer. In 1993, Mr. Potter resigned as police chief, and Capt. Moose became chief. After Mr. Potter resigned, the same officer shot a suspect 23 times. Chief Moose fired the officer.
The Francesconi ad is technically correct but misleading. It doesn’t state that the officer fired the 23 shots while Mr. Potter was chief of police. (It does, however, according to b!X, include the sound of shots.)
Here’s the sentence from the KOIN news report as it appeared on KOIN’s website on August 20:
What Potter did was reinstate an officer who was demoted after shooting at a suspect 23 times.
Francesconi’s campaign didn’t say that; it said that Potter reinstated an officer after allegations of excessive force, and after Potter resigned as chief, the officer shot a suspect 23 times. KOIN has telescoped that into one wrong sentence. (KOIN also couldn’t spell “Francesconi” correctly.)
KOIN is not reporting the Francesconi campaign accurately, and people are thinking that the Francesconi campaign said what KOIN said it said, which is not the case.
Don’t get me wrong: the Francesconi campaign has other problems, the main one of which was exemplified by what my recent lunch date, a moderate insider, told me last week: “Francesconi is 40 points behind in the polls.” Her belief, shared by everyone at the table, is that the contest is over.
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To be fair here, the general reception of the ad is that listeners were coming away from it with the impression that Potter was chief when the shooting happened and/or that he kept him on the force afterwards. The ad is very, very clearly designed to leave the listener with precisely that impression, no matter how technically correct it may or may not be.
I find the word of the poll numbers interesting, and perhaps suggestive of a reason why Francesconi opted to move into the realm of distortion and deception, all too often the tactic of those headed towards a loss, even though its a tactic that harms our overall civic processes.
Some Hot Campaign Round-Up Action!
To begin with, an update on the lying and/or incompetent KOIN 6 News. After we first posted about the station passing along the distortions in Jim Francesconi’s negative radio ads as facts, many of our readers began emailing KOIN to object. Two of our …