Wednesday, October 8, 2003

Did Tennant get special treatment in letter rebuttal?

I was quite intrigued by the articles that were published in The Citizen concerning Mr. Schwanitz and Mr. Tennant. I am unaware of your company policy as it relates to editorials being published about elected city officials and candidates.

Is it the company policy to allow any elected officials/candidates to read editorial articles about them, prior to them being published, and rebut any accusations on the same page and on the same day? If so, I think that is a wonderful policy and I believe that it should be made public in your newspaper, as well as disseminated to Ms. Rutherford, Mr. Kourajian and Mr. Poolman.

Hopefully, it is NOT the case that Mr. Tennant has connections with your staff and that he is the ONLY candidate that will be given this type of "Priority" treatment in your newspaper? I'm sure the other candidates would appreciate knowing that you are willing to uphold this full disclosure policy, in advance of printing articles concerning them, during the rest of this election process.

Bryan D. Kaiser

Peachtree City, Ga.

[The editor replies: The letter writer made a detailed charge of a bankruptcy court case, a relevant political campaign issue. We would not print such a serious assertion without checking its veracity. In determining whether the allegation was factual, we took a simple course: We asked the one who allegedly filed the bankruptcy if the assertion were true. He subsequently wrote a rebuttal letter that appeared in the next week's paper. Should similar charges arise about current candidates, we would contact them to ask if the charges were true. If untrue, we would not print the charges. If they chose to respond, we would print the responses.]