Tuesday morning there was an apparent home invasion in Galveston in which we learned from area residents 4 men invaded a home, shot the occupants and bound them with duct tape.
We reported the four were 3 Hispanic men and 1 black man. This was reported to us by a reader who lived in the area and also had contact with other residents saying the same thing.
Later the Galveston Police Dept. issued a press release although it did not include some of this information so we included the spin words 'allegedly' and 'reportedly' and so on.
Tuesday evening I saw the story on a couple of the Houston TV stations. Wow! They had helicopters hovering over the neighborhood and a reporter standing in front of the police station reading a prepared press release issued by the police. Duh! They sent a reporter over 60 miles to stand in front of a building and read from a sheet of paper?
Oh! They did get the police chief to make a statement. It last less than 10 seconds in the story. He said, "it appeared to be robbery". It's no secret 99.9% of home invasions are robbery, usually for drugs.
In the end the public learned very little from these TV reports and I cannot imagine how much it cost the station to do that one story. Home invasions like this are a dime-a-dozen in Houston. It must have been a slow news days. The anchor person could have read the story from his/her desk and we would have learned just as much. But of course we wouldn't have seen the police station in background or got to hear the police chief's 10 second alarming statement.
That's the way I see it. How about you?
I agree with Breck. Houston just wanted "their" name on the story.
ReplyDeleteBreck had the story. Breck had the facts and printed them. Breck
doesn't need Houston.