Biased? Hardly.

Recently, I've been taking a lot of heat from some local residents because, apparently, my reporting of the Bear Creek Intermediate School is one-sided and biased to them. They say my stories appear to be advertisements for the school district and that I'm completely ignoring the people who are against this.

To all of those people, I just want to say that you have zero idea what you are talking about.

To be honest, I couldn't care less if EASD builds a new school. I'm not for it, I'm not against it, I simply report the information necessary for people to take in. We've let them know the maximum cost of the project. We reported on the Act 34 meeting in which residents spoke out against the school (in our May 8, 2008 issue, by the way. The headline even talks about residents being against the school). For every single phase of the project, we've been there, reporting facts. We do NOT include opinions on news stories, that's what our Editorial page on Page 4 every week is for. We don't include opinions whether they are from John Doe who thinks the school is the best thing ever to happen, and we don't include opinions of Jane Doe who thinks the school is a terrible idea.

Just because we don't print YOUR opinions on the subject, does NOT make my reporting one-sided. I do not work for the district, I work for the Elizabethtown Chronicle. I've heard a lot of questions raised about the location of Bear Creek. There are a fair amount of people who believe that EASD should build it on the land they own next to East High Elementary. I knew of these concerns, so I sat down and did a very comprehensive story about the district's athletics plans, which involve using the majority of that land, making it impossible to build the intermediate school there. At no point in the story did I write "this is the best idea ever." No, I simply laid out the district's plans very specifically. I outlined what THEY (not me) are planning to do to the tennis courts, Thompson Field, Jane Hoover, the multi-purpose fields, etc. And I did this simply to clear up any confusion that anyone might have.

But there are a fair amount of people out there who are acting as if I was doing the district a favor by writing the story. I was not. I was doing my job. And my job is to report the FACTS to this community. Read the story again, and you'll see that that's exactly what I did. Just because it was long, or because it was about something that you do not agree with, does not mean it was written with a bias.

I love Elizabethtown and I love this community, but I've had it with people who do not know the first thing about journalism calling me or emailing me and accusing me of being biased or telling me how to do my job. If I don't write specifically what they want me to, they think the article is horrible. Which is a pathetic lapse in judgment.

That said, I'm working on getting answers to resident concerns for a story (as I have been for 3 weeks. It takes a while to plow through more than 50 pages of notes and condense it into a newspaper article). But it isn't because I'm doing the residents a favor or that I'm trying to tear down the district. It's because people deserve to know the truth and my job is to deliver it to them. And that's what I intend to continue doing, as I have done in my first 4-1/2 years working for this paper.