Luke Hellier’s Style of Journalism
Since this question of Uptake bias was raised by Luke Hellier at Minnesota Democrats Exposed, let’s take a look at what he’s been up to lately to get a feel for what bias really looks like.
Hellier recently posted a story on Minnesota Democrats Exposed where he republished what he thought (or pretended) was a comment by local Democrat Gavin Sullivan.
There are a few issues with this story.
1. Gavin Sullivan is a Democrat, but he does not speak for all Democrats. This makes Hellier’s headline absurd. I pointed this out to Luke in the comments.
2. Hellier never bothered to rewrite the headline to better reflect the content of his post. However that could be because . . .
3. The story Luke Hellier cites as being written by Sullivan was, in fact, not written by Sullivan. Yet that’s the by-line Hellier gave it. Here is how Hellier presented the story:
Gavin Sullivan seemed surprised to see his by-line on something he didn’t write, so he left a comment for Hellier as well:
4. Again, Luke Hellier did nothing to correct himself. Not even when he mistakenly attributes a quote to the wrong person. As someone who seems interested in getting out the truth – albeit from a different political perspective than my own – you’d think Hellier would show more respect for the truth when he gets a story downright wrong.
So, who was the right person? The anonymous mary334, who happened to leave a comment on Sullivan’s blog:
Looking back on it, I fell into the trap of assuming that Hellier could quote people accurately, so I missed the fact that Hellier was claiming that an anonymous comment spoke for all Democrats, which is even more absurd than suggesting that Gavin Sullivan speaks for all Democrats.
March 26th, 2010 at 4:18 pm
These young political hacks–Hellier, O’Keefe types–do they realize the damage they are inflicting–not on Meffert, or Gavin–rather it is on their own reputation.
This isn’t the equivalent of posting the photo on your Facebook account of puking in the toilet, this is serious adult reputations that are being judged based on these flawed–on so many levels I didn’t know which 5-6 words to insert–postings.
And the internet is not an employment file that no one sees and gets shredded in 2 years…Luke (and every prospective employer) will be able to google his name for the next decade or more and find these revelations into his character, decision-making, ethics, and work habits.
Seriously Luke…I don’t know you, you might think this is how careers get built in politics, but instead you are on the path to destroying your career options. I urge you to stop this behavior and apologize before it is too late.
April 5th, 2010 at 9:16 am
[...] Back on March 26th, I showed an example of Luke Hellier completely hosing up a story by attributing a comment to the wrong person, calling a comment a blog post, and saying that the opinion of one anonymous blogger is the opinion of Democrats in general. And, doing nothing to correct this once it was pointed out repeatedly to Luke in the comments of his blog post. [...]