KRTV Great Falls Quashes Dissent
In case you missed it, the City Commission was recently asked by City Manager Greg Doyon about how to proceed with City Commission meetings in light of a recent spike in local Covid-19 cases.
In an informal consensus vote commissioners decided 4-1 to move the upcoming September 7 City Commission work session and regular meeting from in-person to all virtual. It’s unclear how far into the future the all virtual meeting rule will apply.
I was the dissenting vote for reasons I will address later and in a different format.
KRTV ran a story about it this morning, and posted a link to it on its Facebook page.
What happened next was curious to say the least.
One commenter, former Great Falls resident Kenny Volk, wrote the following:
“With the exception of Rick Tryon (the lone dissenting voice), are commissioners still going out to eat, leaving their homes, or otherwise physically participating in everyday society?”
First, KRTV ran interference for the politicians, interjecting to Volk’s rhetorical question by encouraging him, rather smarmily and inappropriately in my opinion, to contact the commissioners directly via the Zoom meeting.
Isn’t it the job of a “news organization” and “digital journalists” to go and ask those questions of the politicians rather than making snarky comments, then deleting the post altogether, in response to readers/viewers legitimate queries?
Then, curiously, KRTV deleted Volk’s post and their response to it:
Undeterred, Volk reposted his question, asking why it was deleted in the first place.
It looks to me like Deletin’ Dave Sherman is more “passionate” about curating the so-called “news” in KRTV’s digital content to fit his own bias and opinions than he is about informing local folks in an unbiased and straightforward fashion.
And then, KRTV deleted the entire post. You can’t find it anywhere now.
If you had any interest in knowing how to contact your local government, definitely do not rely upon KRTV. They’re not journalists; they’re activists.
And everybody knows it.
VOTE FOR FRED BUROW!
No
I agree that KRTV facebook admins are a bunch of tools and cowards, but I don’t see how that first reply was “smarmy.” I think you should craft your arguments more carefully, Rick. This isn’t the only example of how many posts they delete. How about writing about how many posts that have comments turned off entirely?
Fair enough. Thanks.
A reporter telling a reader to ask a politician questions directly instead of commenting on a news article is a little smarmy. Do you really think they provided the link for journalistic edification reasons or more likely as a sarcastic slap down?
VOTE FOR FRED BUROW!