WAJR Reports On "News" Without Acknowledging An Obvious Problem
This morning, WAJR's generally dead Twitter account suddenly started spitting out tweets about a letter that the city the radio station had "obtained." Here's a subsequent news article about the mystery letter. It is headlined:
Coal and gravel trucks not responsible for most accidents in Morgantown
The articles goes on to show that the organizations who have had the most accidents downtown are two separate busing companies, a beverage delivery service, a garbage hauler, and a tanker-truck outfit. The proposed ban on heavy-trucks wouldn't prevent those groups from taking heavy trucks through downtown. Now we're meant to gasp at the hypocrisy of it all.
Except that anybody with any familiarity with the proposed heavy-truck ban knows that those organizations with legitimate reasons to be downtown - like, say, providing transportation, or drinks, or hauling garbage, or delivery gasoline - were always going to be allowed. Those that are only using downtown Morgantown as a shortcut though? Those were always the trucks being targeted, as the city is getting absolutely nothing out of them cutting through. That includes the aforementioned "coal and gravel" trucks mentioned in the headline.
Knowing that though is insufficient, because it hardly tells the entire story. So let's go further, and let's start that process by noting that the coal and gravel trucks alluded to in the WAJR headline are driven by independent contractors. Anybody tallying total numbers of accidents was almost certainly not counting all of the independent contractors as a single, monolithic group. They would have each been considered separately, thus making it absurdly easy to jigger the numbers in such a way as to make those five organizations look like a bigger threat to driver safety than the "coal and gravel" trucks that roll through town daily.
But perhaps more important than this obvious manipulation of the available statistics - where are those statistics coming from again? - is the fact that WAJR is owned by the same family that owns Greer Limestone: the Raeses. And ain't it just the damndest coincidence in the world that Greer Limestone produces the gravel that goes on the trucks that rumble through town that WAJR trumpets as being safer than other types of heavy trucks? Weirdly, WAJR didn't mention its ownership in today's hyperventilating news-story.
The Raeses also own the Dominion Post, a newspaper whose editorializing policy always oddly reflects whatever is in the Raese's best interests, something that other local news organizations always forget to mention when they're breathlessly reporting on the Dominion Post's editorial positions.
That's the point here: if a Raese affiliated media outlet (WKKW, WVAQ, WAJR, WCLG, the Dominion Post, the entirety of the West Virginia Radio Corporation) is saying anything, via either news or editorial, rest assured that this position has little to do with a common understanding of "truth" and plenty to do with what's best for the Raese family. This is true in its ongoing attempt to screw WVU Athletics out of millions of dollars in revenue and it's true in today's letter. Speaking of which, that letter was oddly uncredited to any particular person, almost certainly because it was prepared by somebody affiliated with the Raese family. Once again, just an oversight, I'm sure. Still, this is yet another example of the longstanding reality that the overwhelming majority of our local media reflects only what is best for its owners, not necessarily what's best for everybody else.
