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Recently the Salem, Oregon Salem​-News​.com pub­lished a polit­i­cal per­spec­tive by the paper’s Executive News Editor, Tim King. The story was titled, “Are Drugs Dogs and Increasing Police Scrutiny the Answer for Oregonians?” It’s dek read: “A spe­cial traf­fic oper­a­tion on an Oregon Highway raises many ques­tions about Civil Rights.” Like many of his con­tem­po­raries, King, a twelve-year vet­eran TV news pro­ducer, pho­to­jour­nal­ist, war cor­re­spon­dent, reporter, assign­ment edi­tor, and cur­rent Executive News Editor for Salem​-News​.com, seems both unable to stay on a sin­gle point for a measly 900 words nor able to report on events.

Mr. King’s story begins with a dis­tress­ing intro­duc­tion to pos­si­ble civil rights vio­la­tions by Oregon State Police. That’s the end of that story how­ever; the intro­duc­tion has noth­ing to do with the point of the story. Instead, the actions of the police are used a hook in a bait and switch. Just when the reader’s inter­est is piqued and his out­rage begins to build, King switches to the unre­lated point he really wanted to make: his dis­plea­sure with the fact that mar­i­juana is illegal.

I attempted to com­ment on the arti­cle, but the site no longer seems to be accept­ing com­ments on the arti­cle. Thus I offer my edi­to­r­ial response here.

Dear Mr. King:

You had there the begin­ning of a com­pelling story about police abuse of civil lib­er­ties. Regrettably you aban­doned the orig­i­nal point of the story and switched in mid-stream to a com­pletely dif­fer­ent piece–an op-ed express­ing your dis­sat­is­fac­tion with the ille­gal­ity of marijuana.

Did you inter­view the police offi­cers per­form­ing the ques­tion­able road­side stops? Did you con­tact the OR State Police for com­ment? When and where was the hear­ing in which the Hispanic man’s case was heard and sub­se­quently dis­missed? What was his name? Who was the Judge? After twelve years in the busi­ness, you are famil­iar with the fun­da­men­tal ques­tions a reporter might ask, aren’t you?

Next time you begin a story, fin­ish it. Your head­line and dek caught atten­tion, but you used them as a bait and switch to jump on a soap­box about the legal­iza­tion of mar­i­juana. I don’t dis­agree with your posi­tion on that topic, but I also don’t appre­ci­ate being suck­ered into read­ing your stale regur­gi­ta­tion of an opin­ion expressed iden­ti­cally by count­less oth­ers before you.

Unfortunately your low-on-facts, slanted, and shoddy arti­cle is not atyp­i­cal of print and online report­ing by main­stream media out­lets these days. While main­stream media whines that they’re los­ing read­ers and view­ers to the Internet, they fail to rec­og­nize that they are them­selves the cause. After all, a com­plete news story or per­sua­sive edi­to­r­ial can more eas­ily and con­sis­tently be found amidst blogs and tweets than in the aver­age main­stream news paper, broad­cast, or site.

In short, Tim: Hide your stash bet­ter, stop whin­ing, and learn how to be a news man.