The Daily Times - In For A Penny

Salisbury’s newspaper, the Daily Times, has decided that they would rather lie than admit an error. Given an opportunity to correct that mistake, they would rather compound that error with additional lies. Why not? Daily Times publisher Greg Bassett seems to believe that they are beyond criticism or action.

Sadly, any community the size of Salisbury should have a daily newspaper, readers are acting. They are choosing to cease being customers of a paper they can’t trust and seeking their local news from other sources, including SBYNews. Some recent actions by the staff and management of the Daily Times shed a bright light on why readers continue to abandon their local newspaper.

On Thursday, the DT published a story – “Black Friday Security in Jeopardy”. In its original form, the third paragraph read:

“A memorandum of understanding -- modeled after an agreement forged with The Centre at Salisbury mall for similar services -- was signed by Muir Boda, asset protection coordinator for the Salisbury Walmart, and forwarded to the council for consideration.”

It was pointed to the management of the paper that this was not true. In fact, reporter Sarah Lake was at the meeting and KNEW that it wasn’t true. Rather than correct their mistake by publishing a correction in Friday’s paper, they simply went behind the readers’ backs and changed Lake’s lie (in the online edition) to read:

“A memorandum of understanding -- modeled after an agreement forged with The Centre at Salisbury mall for similar services -- would be signed by Muir Boda, asset protection coordinator for the Salisbury Walmart, and forwarded to the council for consideration, according to a memo from Police Chief Barbara Duncan.”

This corrected version is accurate. It also proves the bias of Lake and the DT by keeping a quote from Mayor Jim Ireton which is not true. This is a stock-in-trade device of the DT; wrap a lie in quotes and claim that they have fulfilled their journalistic responsibility. They also can’t claim, as they have in the past, of being unable to point out known factual errors because they did point out an error made by councilwoman Terry Cohen:

Cohen also said there was no mention of the name of who signed the agreement and the mayor's accusations regarding the council's actions being politically motivated are baseless and offensive.

However, a recording available on the city's website reveals that Cohen mentioned Boda several times throughout the initial conversation regarding the MOU, at this week's work session. Visit www.ci.salisbury.md.us.

Cohen was wrong. Boda’s name was mentioned and he was also mentioned in SPD chief Barbara Duncan’s memo. Lake pointed it out, as she should. Ireton makes a statement to Lake, it’s not true. Lake knows that it isn’t true. Yet, there is not correction of Ireton’s misstatement (OK, it’s really a lie).

This brings us to Sunday’s newspaper. Bassett runs a piece by councilwoman Debbie Campbell acknowledging Lake’s (and the DT’s) collusion with Ireton and councilwoman Laura Mitchell in attacking Campbell, Cohen, and councilman Tim Spies. They preface Campbell’s piece with the following “note”:

Editor’s Note: The following is an opinion submission from Salisbury City Councilwoman Deborah Campbell. As part of routine city beat coverage, the reporter Campbell criticizes attended a Nov. 8 public meeting regarding the ongoing city charter petition effort; no “collusion” occurred. Mayor Jim Ireton’s comments were part of a news release sent to all local media outlets. The Daily Times stands by its Nov. 10 story and all subsequent reporting on the matter.

As shown above, they DON’T stand by their story. Like a thief in the night, they changed the story on their online edition without printing a correction. Sarah Lake wrote a provable lie. This wasn’t a quote from Ireton; that comes later in the article. Ireton’s quote was a lie too; one that Lake was unwilling to acknowledge because of her collusion with Ireton.

The management of the Daily Times claims that Lake took part in a “public meeting regarding the ongoing city charter petition effort; no ‘collusion’ occurred. Again, the DT compounds one lie with another. This was not a public meeting. It was an invitation-only strategy session at the Salisbury Area Chamber of Commerce. The attendees were a group of people who are working together in opposition to Campbell, Cohen, and Spies (the charter change is only their latest guise). One of those attendees was DT reporter, and assistant editor, Sarah Lake. Her role was to provide the political group with a “nice, flattering, front page article”. She fulfilled her obligation well.

It was also interesting that the DT stripped Campbell’s article, billed as op-ed but really far more accurate than any “news” Lake has written recently, from their online edition. As readers flee the biased, less than accurate coverage of the Daily Times, I can only guess that they didn’t want those people to read how badly the DT allowed this one to be bungled.

Even if one does not accept the notion that lying is morally wrong, it remains a poor course of action. One lie, or more in the case of Lake and the Daily Times, begets more lies as you try to cover up the initial ones. However, the DT continues to struggle against a tsunami of biased and outright false coverage of city news. I can only conclude that they are going to continue to compound error upon error, lie upon lie, in the hopes that this issue will go away. It won’t. Sadly, until the DT’s management realizes this they will continue to lose readers as a growing number of citizens refuse to lay down their hard earned money for a paper which they can neither trust, nor respect.

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