Amongst the 24,000+ comments left on VB‘s stories and the positive private emails that we receive each week, we sometimes receive angry criticism.
Yes, it’s true. Who’d believe it ;-)
Luckily for us, it doesn’t happen very often, but when it does, we do try to take the criticism constructively.
To give you an idea of the (mild end of the) sort of stuff that we have to deal with behind the scenes, we thought that perhaps we’d show you one of the latest emails to hit our inbox.
Doing the best we can
As regular followers of our live coverage will know, we never promise verbatim reporting as that would be impossible, but try to give a flavour of what’s being discussed and, because we’re human, we do sometimes make mistake when reporting (although these are normally corrected pretty soon after being discovered).
Evidently, this wasn’t apparent to the email writer who took great offence at our recent live coverage of the Sandown hustings.
I have been enjoying Ventnor blog for some time now and as someone who prefers online information to newspapers I have found I have learnt much about what is going on locally which would otherwise have passed me by.
This morning I noticed from the VB Twitter feed that you had covered the hustings last night. I started to eagerly read. I was a bit confused when there didn’t seem to be information from each of the candidates’ introductions. I had been impressed by the leaflet I had recieved through my door from the English Democat candidate and had wanted to discover what he had said in person.
By chance this evening I met Ian Dunsire and asked him why he had made no introduction at the hustings. He assured me that he had been the first candidate to speak and that the VB reporter had arrived after he had spoken.
I am dissapointed that no mention of missing the start of hustings was made in the report.
I feel this was very biased reporting and should have been made clear along with as many details as possible about what was missed.
I am positive that any election candidate would be delighted to pass on details of their introduction.
It is terrible that your coverage has needed to be updated many times, sometimes to correct complete misquotes and that in some places the reporter did not know who was talking.
VB’s coverage of this hustings has left my faith in VB’s greatly shaken –
have I been reading reports on other issues which are equally biased and full of errors?
A report which should have helped inform my choice in the coming election, especially on local issues, has left me unable to trust what I have read and concerned that I have not had access to as many sources of information as possible.
Happy to be corrected
To be fair, we did make a couple of errors with names during the coverage (not knowing all the candidates by name), but corrected these as soon as we were notified and apologised to those concerned.
No harm done, particularly as the version that the aggrieved reader would’ve been looking at the next morning should have been the updated version.
We also stated in the reporting that we’d arrived 20 mins into the hustings, so clearly late. We have many skills, but rather annoyingly, stepping back in time is not one of them.
Pleased
As the saying goes ‘you can’t please all of the people all of the time’ – or in this case, you can’t please some people at all :)
