Dear Dennis:
I would like to complain in the strongest possible terms about
Northwest Public Radio's non-coverage of the floods last week. I had NWPR
on virtually all the time; I never heard a single story that indicated any
NWPR staffer had even gathered a story over the phone from any flooded
town, much less visited one. There were no reports from Colfax or Palouse
when those towns were battling for their lives. Waitsburg was evacuated;
no story. No interviews; no reports from anywhere. Nothing but lists of
school and road closures and the occasional wire story.
Why did we not hear a police chief or mayor in Palouse, Colfax,
Dayton, or St. Maries telling us what their town's situation was, whether
the river was still rising, how high the water was on the highway, etc? The
Spokane TV stations recognized a big story: they set up satellite
transmitters in BOTH Palouse and Colfax for live coverage -- no small
effort. NWPR could have done the same coverage with a simple cell phone.
And if it couldn't be bothered to send someone out it could at least have
done some armchair coverage by calling townsfolk. NWPR even managed to
avoid reporting Pullman's flooding though some staffers actually DROVE
through it.
This was the type of story where radio is particularly valuable.
People needed to know what was going on: whether more volunteers were
needed, whether the river upstream was still rising, how other towns were
faring, etc.
The floods covered NWPR's whole region, the region where thousands
of people donate money to keep NWPR solvent. They deserve a hell of a lot
better from NWPR than what they got last week. Every day we hear the slogan on NWPR "Covering the region with
in-depth news. . ." This was the region's biggest news in decades, and
NWPR didn't cover it "in depth," it scarcely covered it at all.
John Francis (An angry supporter of NPR)