Wow, writing one-sided pieces that only quote one side of the argument. Good thing the Mercury never does that!

I especially appreciate your clearly even-handed and unbiased reporting on transportation issues, Sarah. It's impossible to tell what your personal stance is!

Where did you come up with this story? Oh, that's right! An active Measure 66 advocate contacted you, and you transcribed his argument! Totally different from what KGW did.

Just to feed Blabby's exclamation-fueled fire: ask Sarah where Our Oregon's Scott Moore used to work. !

Blabby, one difference is that the Mercury doesn't pretend it's objective (see mission statement*), while KGW represents itself as such - you should have different expectations for each because of that.

* Why is it so hard to find the mission statement on the website?

I'm totally fine with advocacy journalism as long as it's clear that's what it is. In the case of the Mercury, and of Sarah's reporting, it is.

Also, these are blog posts we're talking about (or sarcastically hyperventilating about) here.

But the KGW report seems to present itself as all objective and newsy, yet was apparently BASED on activist blog posts. I say apparently because the original KGW report seems to have been edited, and the video yanked, so it's hard to check.

Colin and anylanding basically summed up what I was going to say, but I'll add on anyway because it's an interesting discussion.

When I report something in an opinionated way on the blog, it's pretty obvious that it's my opinion, not a news piece that seeks to be balanced (see "fuck you Del Monte" post above).

Reporting pieces in the paper is more complicated, because we don't strive to be "objective" but do, always, try to be accurate and fair. That means even when we have an article that says something is a bad idea or a miscarriage of justice, we include the other side and don't distort the facts (a good example of this type of reporting is this CRC article: http://www.portlandmercury.com/portland/th…).

In this case, the KGW story did both those things: It distorted the facts about drivers licenses to fit a preconceived thesis and it didn't include the other side.

"we include the other side and don't distort the facts (a good example of this type of reporting is this CRC article)"

Um, that article is entitled "Three new reasons to oppose the CRC". But it does include some counterpoints. As far as not distorting the facts, you regularly choose those sources of info and data that agree with your bias. You got a lot of mileage from Joe Cortright's "study" on CRC costs. Cortright was a known opponent of hte CRC and the "study" was paid for by one of its most vocal opponents. Something tells me they had their conclusion before crunching a single number.

Blabby, if we throw out every study because someone who was interested in the outcome was funding that study, we wouldn't have any studies of anything.

There are a lot of ways to attack a hack study, but declaring it invalid (or highly suspect) on it's face simply because someone with an interest in the outcome funded it shouldn't be one of them. That relies on the shaky premise that the person conducting the study is "in the tank" simply because they agreed to undertake it.

It's KGW, the same channel that hired Canzano.