Playing fast and loose with the facts: The Truth vs. Margaret Menge

On January 30, 2015, Margaret Menge had this on the front page of her newspaper, across 5 columns (of a 6 column paper) in boldface type:

Resident to City: Need Money for Roads? Sell the Golf Course! 

Here is the first paragraph of Ms. Menge's story: 

"Need money for road repair? Street lights? Sewers? Don't go to the bond markets. Sell the golf course(!), Marcus Kelly, a resident of Lake Worth, told the City Commission on Tuesday night at a special meeting at the Compass Gay & Lesbian Community Center."

Then Margaret Menge penned another 9 paragraphs about selling the Lake Worth Municipal Golf Course. A total of nearly 400 words. But if Margaret Menge had bothered to make a phone call (or two) or send an email (or two) she would have learned this:

The City of Lake Worth cannot sell the Municipal Golf Course. 

The Lake Worth Golf Course is deed restricted. If the City of Lake Worth decides it doesn't want the Golf Course any longer, the land reverts to the family and heirs that deeded it to the City. Period. End of story. The meeting where the comment was made to "sell the Golf Course" was held last Tuesday night (1/27/15) so there was plenty of time to discover the facts. But, no, Ms. Menge didn't take the time to find the facts. She would rather have the citizenry believe, for at least a week, or more, to think it was possible to sell the Municipal Golf Course. Hysteria and confusion ensued. Question: is that a role a community paper should play?

Here is one of the city deeds for the Lake Worth Municipal Golf Course. Read and you will discover that if the City golf course is not maintained as a golf course the land will revert to the "grantee" or "their heirs or assigns."

I (Wes Blackman) am not a trained journalist by trade. Yet Margaret Menge claims to be a trained journalist by trade. If I could find this information why couldn't Margaret Menge?

Here is what Margaret Menge wrote in her newspaper editorial about truth, fact-checking, and details. This editorial appears in the very same paper as her 'story' on "Sell the Golf Course!":  

     I [Margaret Menge] more or less started out in journalism at U.S. News & World Report in New York, and there I learned something about being sure of your facts. We had a fact-checking desk in Washington, and everything in every piece written for the magazine had to be faxed to Washington, with every fact underlined, and backup documentation provided for every fact. 

     The fact checker, Michael [cannot be fact-checked; no last name], said the desk used to laugh about the amount of material that I [Margaret Menge] would send down for even a very small feature piece. I [Ms. Menge] did not want to be wrong, not in any detail, and not in the larger storyline that was being advanced in the piece. This was U.S. News & World Report, after all, a magazine that I grew up with.

Sadly, the standards and experience Margaret Menge acquired at U.S. News & World Report were lost before she landed here in Lake Worth, Florida. 

Should journalists, much like physicians, subscribe to the oath of "First, do no harm?" Is "Michael" at U.S. News & World Report, or any other experienced fact checkers unavailable to help Ms. Menge get the facts straight? As much as Ms. Menge dreams of being a respected journalist she appears to be incapable of seeing more than one, single aspect of a story. She comes into a story with a conclusion and then collects and arranges the 'facts' to support the conclusion and willfully or haphazardly discards others.

I can see why some would like this brand of journalism here. Obscuring the truth furthers the aims of the malcontents among us.