Letter to Wanganui Chronicle Editor - 'ill-informed, bias and wrong' - 2/03/2010

Mayor's Office
Wanganui District Council

The Editor
Wanganui Chronicle

Dear Mr Pringle

You are the latest in a long line of inconsequential 'Chronicle' editors and you have already distinguished yourself with editorials that are ill-informed, biased and wrong. Today's was a perfect example of pejorative prose.

Shall we start in the errors first?

1. The council's communications policy is set by the council, and not by the mayor;

2. It is exactly as suggested by Local Government New Zealand in its governance publications on media policy;

3. It is designed to ensure that the governance and staff of the council are aware of each other's actions - and that factually correct information is presented to the public;

4. It stops media from frivolously utilising officer time (as best illustrated by the Chronicle itself when it unleashes journalism students each year on busy council staff);

5. It is a complete lie to assert that the council responses received "come back as press releases which are, more often than not, only a mayoral opinion - long on rhetoric and short on information." [This statement will form the basis of a complaint to the Press Council because it is so demonstrably untrue]

6. It is also a lie that "even the elected members of the Wanganui District Council are firmly discouraged by the mayor from talking to the media". Indeed, exactly the opposite: I devolved some mayoral authority to councillors through the council spokesmanship policy.

7. The Chronicle seems to be linking this issue with the imminent loss of its $100,000 advertising contract and demonstrating its usual venality on such matters - including the threat of an appeal to the Audit Office!

8. Council serves Wanganui residents, the Chronicle serves its commercial masters. We do not have the divided loyalty of your newspaper;

9. Your news reporters are politically biased: two of them (Anne Marie Emerson and Merania Karauria directly petitioned the NZ Geographic Board against the democratic wish of the community on the Wanganui spelling issue, and Karauria was reprimanded for misrepresenting a mayoral interview to her friends using Chronicle e-mail. A third, Laurel Stowell, is the partner of Richard Thompson - a political opponent of the mayor and Vision Wanganui and stood at the 2007 local body elections for the Horizons regional council.)

I accept you're new to the job and apparently lack formal journalistic training according to reports in your own newspaper.

But I would have thought that the Chronicle's abysmal coverage of council issues over the past five years (esp since the death of civic reporter Dave Laurence) would have been apparent even to you. And that your journalistic staff are obviously leading you by the nose.

Worse: you didn't read or examine any Council papers relating to our media policy.

You need to lift your game, Mr Pringle. The Chronicle already has a reputation as a poor provincial newspaper with an unhealthy preoccupation with cat and dog stories. But misrepresenting council policy and practice is a new low even for the Chronicle.

Yours sincerely

Michael Laws
Mayor

Read the Wanganui Chronicle editorial