The 2011 Whopper of the Year Award Goes To….
Throughout the month of December, readers voted to choose the A2Politico.com Whopper of the Year Award winner. Last year, A2Politico.com gave the 2010 Whopper of the Year to former City Administrator Roger Fraser. For 24 months, Fraser fibbed to Ann Arbor residents through the media and at public City Council meetings, that “property tax revenues are down.” This non-existent decrease in overall revenue was used by Fraser to get Council to pass budgets that included service cuts (police, fire fighters, leaf collection, park maintenance, even powering down streetlights), as well as large increases in fees (facility use fees, water, sewer, and solid waste fees).
This year, readers selected the most egregious fib from among a variety of Whoppers. Links to the A2Politico stories about the statements appear below:
WEEKLY WHOPPER: Mayor Claims City “Not in Hiring Mode Since ’06.” Records Reveal Almost 1,000 FT & PT Hires Since ’06
WEEKLY WHOPPER: “35 Staff Journalists. 407 Years of Experience.”
WEEKLY WHOPPER: “Ann Arbor’s Long Term Debt Has Increased from in $119M in 1999 to $246M in 2010.”
WEEKLY WHOPPER: A2 Streets Are Being Cleared of Snow So Slowly Because, “This Was One of the Wettest Snows in Two Years.”
WEEKLY WHOPPER: “The City will fix the Stadium bridges next spring.”
You can see from the poll, below, which of the statements was selected by A2P readers as the 2011 Whopper of the Year Award.
[polldaddy poll=5754187]
Ironically, the first and second place Whoppers this year come from the same place: AnnArbor.com, one of the city’s local news sites. The runner up was a marketing campaign launched by the news site a few months after it severely cut back on newsroom staff. In the ad’s tagline, AnnArbor.com claimed to have “35 staff journalists” when, in fact, the masthead listed significantly fewer. It was a close race, but the winner is a story written by the news blog’s government reporter, Ryan Stanton, who reported that in Ann Arbor just 21 miles of the city’s hundreds of miles of roads were in poor condition. The story came out a few months before voters were asked to once again approve an expiring road repair millage.
On June 14, 2011, Ryan Stanton, included two handy graphs (below) from, one has to assume, city officials, to accompany his piece. The graphs, which carry the logo of the city, but no other attribution, represented information about the condition of the city’s roads, and the miles of roads that are repaired each year. According to information from city officials, just 21 miles of roads in Ann Arbor are in poor condition. According to the two graphs, Ann Arbor city staffers are doing a fantastic job improving the city’s roads, even while repaving fewer than seven miles of roads each year over the past seven years.
According to the information Stanton presented in his article, city staffers have done a spectacular job of significantly reducing the number of miles of Ann Arbor roads rated in “poor” condition over the past half a dozen years.
The claims aren’t true, and had Stanton checked the archives of AnnArbor.com for previous reporting done by the news site he might have questioned the numbers given to him by city staffers. In a November 9, 2009 piece by Amalie Nash (who left AnnArbor.com to work at the Detroit Free Press) she writes:
“Washtenaw County was fourth in the state for miles of poor roads at 977 miles with a poor rating. Among Michigan counties, it was 14th in overall percentage of poor roads at 43% of its total 5,773 miles of federal aid roads. Ann Arbor ranked third out of nearly 1,800 municipalities in the state with 189 miles in poor condition. Overall, 55% of Ann Arbor’s 342 miles of federal-aid qualified roads were deemed poor, the report shows.”
In November 2009, then, AnnArbor.com reported that 189 miles of roads in Ann Arbor were found to be in poor condition. According to the graph that accompanied Stanton’s June 14, 2011 piece, between 2009 and 2010, Ann Arbor resurfaced 11.5 miles of streets, including both major and local streets. That would, of course, mean that there remain at least 178 miles of roads in poor condition, perhaps more if roads that were in only fair condition deteriorated further. Yet, Ryan Stanton and AnnArbor.com included information from city officials that purports only 21 miles of roads in Ann Arbor are in poor condition. Both graphs from Stanton’s piece appear below.
It is clear that the information in the graph concerning the miles of roads in poor condition, information supplied to Stanton by city officials, is a fairytake, huckster propoaganda. Stanton simply repeated the clearly inaccurate information.
The 2011 A2Politico Whopper of the Year Award goes to Ryan Stanton and AnnArbor.com.
I wish the Ann Arbor news would do this:
Those who comment on the message boards certainly bring up valid points (be it on whatever local issue is important at the moment). It would be nice if they would do a simple Q&A unedited interview. It’s a simple tactic — sit down (or email) and ask questions and get responses. Simple journalism.
Then, they could ask the participant:
“We’ve gotten quite a few comments from our readers/viewers that you have/haven’t (done this/done that). How do you address those concerns?”
By asking such a question it demonstrates that:
1. you’re listening to your audience and encouraging participation.
2. you’re demonstrating critical journalism and willing to ask the hard questions
3. you might not be ‘friends’ or marketing buddies with the person you’re interviewing
@Kai I wish I could say I disagree that AA.com specializes in uncurious reporting insofar as the MEDC, SPARK, UofM, City Hall, DDA, AATA, HRWC etc. are concerned. The day AA.com business writer Nathan Bomey asks SPARK CEO Paul Krutko the simple question about backing up the entity’s job creation numbers, I may break down and send Bomey flowers.
However, Bomey would have to file multiple FOIAs (which A2Politico recently did) to figure out that the LDFA has not been holding SPARK to its contract, and that SPARK has been using cumulative numbers in place of providing both annual and cumulative numbers on job creation.
I am waiting on a FOIA from the University of Michigan to finish the piece. It takes time to get the proof that the LDFA and Ann Arbor SPARK are working in concert to hide the fact that taxpayers are paying a whole lot of money for very sparse results.
It’s not a statement in defense of Ryan (I personally don’t know him), but rather an observation that sometimes I wonder if the Ann Arbor news is acting as a public relations / marketing department. It’s not hard to see that they’re incredibly friendly to MEDC, SPARK, UofM, City Hall, DDA, AATA, HRWC etc. I would presume, that if they stay friendly, then it would favor those within their organization and their friends as well. What’s odd to me, about the Ann Arbor news, is that I’m used to newspapers that go after the ‘dirt’, the scoop, the investigative reporting. Instead I hear that they fired a bunch of folks — like their lead FOIA investigator. In some ways, they seem to act as a pseudo marketing agent for a bunch of folks. Be it good or bad, it can get in the way for critical journalism and can damage the ‘moral compass’ that newspapers used to provide. I’d hope that Ryan’s mistake was just an unfortunate mistake — he asked for some information, he was given the information and he relayed that information to the rest of us. However, if he was told to write about it for someone’s public relations campaign — then that speaks of questionable journalistic ethics and certainly deserves the Whopper.
@Kai do you mean told him to write the piece, or do you mean told him to deliberately misrepresent the facts? If you mean the latter, and Stanton knew perfectly well what he was writing was a Whopper, then we enter a realm of morality and not just journalism. Yes, we do what our bosses tell us to do. I believe in past that has been referred to as “just following orders,” and as a moral justification for doing something, “just following orders” has been thoroughly debunked as an acceptable reason.
Does Ryan Stanton acquiesce when told to write things that are not true, and that he knows are not true? Some people say he does. Alan Goldsmith has said so repeatedly on AnnArbor.com in the comment section. Goldsmith is not, of course, the only commenter at AnnArbor.com to suggest this. Others love his writing and rarely find fault with it.
The Whopper of the Year Award was given to both Stanton and AnnArbor.com to recognize that while his byline appears on the piece, his work is, ultimately, the property of the company that employs him.
Ryan. Congrats.
But… perhaps he’s just the messenger and the real whopper belongs to the one who told him to write it.