Northern Star editor David Kirkpatrick is prone to s-t-r-e-t-c-h things a bit, but today's piece is going way too far.
Under the heading 'Striving for balance and accuracy' Fitzpatrick wrote: "If I had a dollar for every time this newspaper was accused of bias I'd be a millionaire by now."One million times! That's 1,000,000.
Kirkpatrick went on with the male bovine excrement when he added, "... we journalists live by a code of ethics. We have ours printed large on a poster in our tea room. I'd also be a millionaire for the number of times a journo has come to me for advice and I have referred them to that poster for the answer."
Seriously, how does the bloke get anything done at all!? If he's not reading and/or hearing comments about bias he has journos queueing up to seek his valuable advice.
Kirkpatrick has, according to his own count of things, known of or been involved with two million (yes, that's 2,000,000) events associated with either perceptions of bias or providing advice to other journos.
The best part in Kirkpatrick's piece was at the end where he wrote: "It's all about telling a story in the most interesting way we can find. Like song writers and their fans, I'll leave our readers to draw their own conclusions about our stories." Oh, how true!!!
Here's a bit of advice for Kirkpatrick - take your hand off it.
Read the AJA's Code of Ethics here.
After reading the code of ethics, take the next step and read 'How to be a journalist in one easy lesson'.
