An Open Letter to Terry McKinnon and iNews880

The following is a copy of an email that I sent to iNews880 earlier today regarding a blog entry that Terry McKinnon posted today.

I am writing to express my disappointment with Terry McKinnon’s recent blog post “Football and Murder,” which makes a number of sensational claims while providing little to no evidence to back them up. The piece is both racist and classist—it implies that immigrants and working class families are responsible for “creating” children who eventually become murderers and, by extension, only those couples who can afford to have one of them leave the workforce in order to raise their children should be having children in the first place (no one else, it seems, is capable of putting in the effort that McKinnon feels is necessary to prevent children from growing up to become murderous gang-bangers).

It’s also terribly written: using baseball metaphors to discuss football? Surely, McKinnon can do better than that. And his attempt at offering a solution to the murder problem that Edmonton is currently facing is so amateurish and condescending as to be meaningless. An incredibly vague football metaphor is not the same thing as a solution.

I realize that this was a blog post and not a news piece, but Terry is a journalist and the opinions he expresses in his blog should have facts to back them up. There are plenty of arm-chair sociologists blogging about things without any facts; a journalist whose ideas are being published on iNews880′s website should not be one of them.

UPDATE: Sometime yesterday, McKinnon’s post was yanked. I’m actually kind of frustrated by this outcome. Instead of either taking it down (or even leaving it up) and issuing an apology or leaving it up and defending Terry’s right to express his opinions on the iNews880 platform, the post has simply been removed without explanation. It’s as if the whole thing never happened. To me, that editorial decision is the most irresponsible of the options that were available.

2nd UPDATE: Google Cache caught the article before it was taken down, so I’ve edited the link above so that it now points to the cached version.

3rd UPDATE: It turns out that Terry McKinnon isn’t a journalist. He is a community blogger who blogs for iNews880 about southeast Edmonton. I still feel that he should be held to a higher standard since his blog appears on the site of a mainstream news outlet, as opposed to on his own domain. (It should also be noted that iNews880 refers to him as a “citizen journalist.” He may not be trained as a journalist but he is still carrying the title…sort of.)