Harry's Gang: Facts drive the Pine Knot

Scott Holman, the former Cloquet police officer who is now suing the City of Cloquet, didn’t run for mayor as I stated here a few weeks ago; he ran for city council against Kelly Riihiluoma but lost 44 percent to 55 percent. That was in 2002, and Holman reminded me about his comment on “Harry’s Gang” during the campaign that the old water tower should be torn down and sold for scrap. (I was hoping at least one candidate for any city office would want to preserve the old water tower, as we just built a new one but thought the old one was “historical.” Not one candidate agreed with me.)

And it wasn’t Holman whose work with Tessa, the drug-sniffing dog, caught the attention of the Minnesota Supreme Court, as I said. It was a different officer; Holman became Tessa’s handler after that incident (but while the case was pending). I apologized to Holman on the phone last week after his brother pointed out the errors.

Holman was gracious about it, but Pine Knot News editor Jana Peterson was not so kind. She takes her journalism very seriously, and she insists that we double-check our facts, even when we think we remember them clearly. “Don’t rely on your memory,” she told me. “Check your facts. If you don’t have time, tell me and I’ll check your facts.” A quick look on the Secretary of State website would have caught my first mistake, and an even quicker search on my legal database would have fixed the second. (The Supreme Court case doesn’t even mention the officer by name; he’s only mentioned in the underlying Court of Appeals decision.) That’s exactly what I did after learning of my mistakes, and it took me less than 10 minutes.

Lawyers submit a documents to the Court, each and every assertion must be verified. It’s routine. We double-check dates, statute numbers, and case law citations. If one case quotes an older case, we go back and read the older case, too. In every real estate matter, we reference current legal descriptions to the original deed, and we order a copy of each document so we can see the original description. We even read it out loud to each other to catch any minor mistakes, before we use the new legal description. Reliability is crucial. It’s crucial in our newspaper, too, as Jana reminded me last week.

That‘s what makes Pine Knot News a real newspaper — one dedicated to accuracy and unbiased reporting. While my column is an opinion column, the mistakes I made in that column were factual errors; not opinions. And factual errors need to be corrected. As the saying goes — I’m entitled to my own opinion. I’m not entitled to my own facts.

Jana was invited to discuss community newspapers on a Minnesota Public Radio program last week. She said something very interesting about social media: if there’s a car accident, and that accident is reported on social media, people start commenting. Someone might say the driver was drunk. Another might say she’s heard there were injuries. But a news reporter calls the sheriff’s office and gets the facts, then verifies those details by calling the driver or other sources. That is what differentiates real journalism from the rumors. It occurs to me that people writing in the comments aren’t necessarily lying. They just have little motivation to protect their credibility, which makes it easier to say anything without really knowing if it’s true or not.

I think that credibility, and the dedication to correcting any mistakes, is what makes newspapers the front line for news. Sure, we may learn about that car accident from social media. And it may be a flashy story on the TV news. But it’s the newspapers you can rely on for accuracy and verification. If it’s in the newspaper, it should be true.

Pete Radosevich is the publisher of the Pine Knot News community newspaper and an attorney in Esko who hosts the cable access talk show Harry’s Gang on CAT-7. His opinions are his own. Contact him at [email protected].