How do you tell somebody no?

My latest news gathering blog deals with something I ran into while finishing up my latest class story. It dealt with the Americans with Disabilities Act, or the ADA and how some believe the city of Centralia, Mo. hasn't represented people well enough that have disabilities.  My blog for this week has nothing to do with the way I covered the story. I think I covered it fairly well. I certainly got both sides of this story. For those of you who don't know, according to the Great Plains ADA in Columbia, Mo., the city of Centralia, Mo. does not meet 39 ADA requirements for people with disabilities. I feel like I didn't make Mayor Tim Grenke look like an idiot and a discriminator of the disabled, which by the way, he does not intentionally discriminate against them. I did have a problem with something I did afterwards, though.

My central compelling character for this story involved a 50 year old Centralia man who has been in a wheelchair since 2004. He says he has fought the city for a long time about getting more accessible sidewalks, streets, and doorways at public buildings for the disabled. He says the city really didn't listen to him until the ADA report came out, and now that it has, some of those city employees think they've gotten a "bad rep."

I told the man I planned on talking to the mayor about the subject, and he asked me if I could get a copy of the interview afterwards. Without thinking about it too much, I said sure. This piece never aired on real television, so who did I really need to protect right? Wrong. I feel like I kind of "hung the mayor out to dry" a little bit because I decided to give my source the interview I did with his "nemesis." I'm not sure if because he had been very helpful to me and that he had a disability made me want to give him the copy of the interview even more or not. I guess I didn't want to disappoint him.

In retrospect though, I totally regret doing this. As I said before, I don't feel like I portrayed my mayor very well after letting my other source see this. Not that the mayor said anything bad about the disabled man, but I didn't give the mayor the copy of the interviews I did with the man in the wheelchair. Why should I give the disabled man copies of the mayor's interviews? In fact, as I wrote this, I got a text from the man in the wheelchair asking me about a question I had asked him that he never saw the mayor talk about. I just don't want to get into a sticky situation because of this and have the mayor find out about it. Then, it could really come back to haunt me.

Besides, do journalists really have time to go back and get copies of any stories people may do about them? No. We've got deadlines we have to meet. If every source we talked to wanted a copy of the story we did about them, journalists would never get anything else done. Even though I have not started reporting for KOMU yet, I should have told the man, "The Missouri Journalism School's policy states we can't give copies of stories to sources...sorry," even though I don't think they do have a policy. If I had given a source an interview I did for them and the story had aired for KOMU, I could get in big big trouble. I probably never would have done that for him though if the story had aired for KOMU. I'm a little bit smarter than that. From now on, I'll just tell my sources, "KOMU's policy states you can only retrieve video that the station puts on their website...sorry." Why can I say "KOMU" now? Because I got cleared to go to the station!!

See the story KOMU did: http://www.komu.com/KOMU/d7e2017e-80ce-18b5-00fa-0004d8d229cb/a1b3819c-80ce-18b5-0152-e88fbb4ba297.html

See what the city of Centralia said about their city a year ago: http://www.centraliamo.org/files/administration/forms/ADA_Notice.pdf


Mayor Tim Grenke