Was Voice’s headline about Tony Young sensational?
There’s been some debate in the CityBeat office this morning about voiceofsandiego.org’s story about a nearly two-months-old police call from San Diego City Councilmember Tony Young’s house.
One thing we all agree on is that Young and his wife Jacqueline handled the situation beautifully.
We also agree that the way the story was written suggests that Voice wanted the story to be much bigger than it turned out to be.
Where we disagree is whether the headline was unfair. The headline is “Domestic Violence Incident Reported at Councilman’s Home.” Certainly, the first thought that comes to mind is that a member of the City Council beat up his wife, but, as the story says, there was no evidence that any physical violence occured. Ultimately, what you get from the story is that Tony and Jacqueline Young had a gnarly argument that obviously scared Mrs. Young enough that she wanted the police to intervene. She told reporter Will Carless that her husband never hit her.
So, you might argue that using the word violence is unfair.
But the police report called the incident a “domestic violence” case, so one could argue that Voice was simply being technically accurate. Our hunch is that it was only called “violence” because that’s a catch-all category for this kind of call.
But you have to be careful with matters such as domestic violence, which carries such a terrible stigma. If I were doing the story, I might have written a headline like this: “Heated argument at councilman’s home prompts call to police.”
Another question is whether this was a story at all. We lean in Voice’s favor on that one. A police call from a public figure’s house is news. But it was nearly two months ago—that certainly diminishes its value. Once Carless learned that there was no evidence of violence, should he have just dropped it, considering the staleness of the story? What is the value to the public in knowing that there was a super-heated yell-fest at the Young household on Feb. 16? Debatable.
Whatever the Youngs thought of the incident’s news value, they politely discussed the matter with Carless, saying they were embarrassed by it, and that was the right way to handle it.
Why don’t you guys spend some time investigating your own stories, instead of being so obsessed with other publications? Enough!
Well, we do do our own stories, and you might not agree with this, but a longstanding part of the mission of alternative newsweeklies is media criticism.
Yeah, I’m sorry, you’re right. I just think it’s a huge tendency of domestic violence victims to back-out of their original report and someone should look into whether police take the calls seriously enough. BTW, you guys hiring? lol.
I think it is good that CityBeat is questioning these kind of stories. It seems the VOSD has become an advocate for an agenda that is targeting certain african- american politicians and printing non stories instead of facts. If someone gets convicted of something now that is a story. But this game of printing a story every time a police report is written is nonsense. I wouldn’t be surprised at all if some one who has curried favor is going to run against Tony in the primary and this is just a preliminary attack on Tony’s character.
Now we have another suspicious police report story published on Monday by the VOSD once again targeting an African american politician. Isn’t Ben Hueso’s state assembly campaign being run by a Sheriff’s Association spokesperson? This seems like this Poala Avila has got to be the source for all these police report stories. This has got to be Poala, Lorena Gonzales and Ben Hueso (who is in a heap of trouble politically) attempting to smear candidates who they consider threats. It will be interesting to see what the US Attorney discovers during their investigation into these police report leaks.