Last month I asked readers to tell me what cliches and overused expressions they see in The Pilot that irk them.
Guess what emerged as the No. 1 complaint? Some readers say that we treat military personnel unfairly in our crime reporting.
It’s something I’ve heard from time to time. And that’s not surprising, considering that this is a military area.
“It seems that every time a member of the military (often extending to retired or former service members) commits a crime, their service affiliation is mentioned, whether or not it has anything to do with the infraction,” said J.J. Bobowicz.
“How come we hardly ever see a civilian’s occupation so indicated?” Bobowicz asked. “And unless it’s important to the story, why mention it at all?”
A suspect’s military affiliation is readily noted in headlines, while that happens less often for civilians, some readers said.
“For example, we may read one morning (although I never hope to), `USS George Washington sailor kills 2 in drunk driving incident,”’ said David W. Plocharczyk.
“Maybe if a fair standard is applied, we would read `Food Lion employee kills 2 in drunk driving incident,’ ” he said.
Bonnie V. Winston, who heads our Public Safety Team, understands these readers’ concerns. She’s aware that they are worried the public’s perception of military personnel may be tainted by what one military caller termed “bad apples.” It’s a concern akin to that frequently voiced by some African-American readers who worry that negative crime coverage contributes to stereotypes of blacks.
“We try to give details about people — the victims and the perpetrators — and one of those details is occupation,” Winston said. “It may seem a lot of military people are involved (in crime), but the military is a large employer here.
“We don’t want to be unfair to anyone,” said Winston, who noted that the military designation of a suspect isn’t always included in a story’s first sentence or a headline.
In the coming weeks, I’ll share other reader responses about trite expressions or other things that annoy them.
Present at the creation? I’ve got to take my hat off to Wylie R. Cooke Jr. The guy’s well-preserved. I mean, can you imagine looking that good after working so hard for so long?
The 61-year-old Cooke has been with MMM Design Group of Norfolk “since 1945,” according to a brief in Tuesday’s Local Scene column in the Business section.
Which would mean that he joined the firm when he was almost 6 years old!
That’s incorrect, of course. And it wasn’t The Pilot’s fault. It was wrong in the MMM Design Group press release. Someone mistakenly equated the date of the company’s founding to Wylie’s tenure.
Cooke took some ribbing about the error, but he was in good spirits when I chatted with him.
“It was tough to work at age 6,” he joked.
Cooke said that some of his friends called to “give me a hard time.”
“One said he’d been contacted by child services, which wanted to know if I’d been abused as a child by being made to work so young,” Cooke said.
A correction ran Wednesday on the Cooke error, but I didn’t put it in. The Business Team leader did.
Unfortunately, the correction was incorrect. Sean Olson, an editorial assistant with the Business Team, got more wrong information from the company staffer who submitted the press release. Cooke has NOT been “associated with MMM Design Group for about 25 years,” as the correction said. It’s more like 13 years — off and on.
Cooke’s company merged with MMM Design Group in 1981, and Cooke became a vice president. He left three years later to join another firm, then returned in 1991.
Cooke, by the way, has been named MMM Design Group’s director of architecture. We got that part right.
Make that… Readers of “The Buzz” in Wednesday’s Sports section had every reason to be confused. The lead item said that Norfolk is ranked 157th of the 376 cities that have been designated as the nation’s best sports cities by Sporting News.
But the headline told a different story: “We’re 154!”
Which prompted a caller to suggest that we need to get our act together.
Norfolk is actually 157. The headline was wrong.
Then there was the editorial (“An odd debate in Northern Virginia”) on Aug. 3 that said:
“Northern Virginia roads are clogged much of the day. Fairfax County public schools have some 16,000 portable classrooms.”
No wonder the roads are clogged, readers must have thought. Think of all those mothers driving kids to schools to fill all those classrooms, not to mention bumper-to-bumper student drivers.
A caller, a member of an area school board, wondered if we didn’t mean to say there are 16,000 students in portable classrooms. “That’s a lot of classrooms,” he said.
He’s right. We meant to say 16,000 students are in portable classrooms.
