Weird Coverage Of County Clerk Social Security Number Scandal
Note to Rochester media: please stop carrying water for the local GOP. Take a look at the video from this WHAM13 report– it sure seems a little slanted to me. Reporter Sean Carroll, who usually does a much better job than this, has a back and forth with the anchor where they focus, with Great Consternation and Furrowing of Brows, on the GOP talking points.
The GOP wants this to be the narrative:
She [County Clerk Cheryl Dinolfo] said her opponent, Tom Hasman, is doing more harm than good by pointing this out, and could have just called her if he found someone’s Social Security number on her Web site.
And Carroll and the anchor focus on this in the video. “If only Tom had called me, this would all be taken care of!” Problem with Dinolfo’s spin is, she’s known about this problem for over a year. Here’s the July 2007 letter that Dem County Legislator Travis Heider sent her to let her know about the problem. Plus, media contacted Dinolfo about this hours before Tom Hasman’s press conference.
Instead of focusing on “Why did Hasman hold a press conference?”, shouldn’t they be asking “Why did it take Hasman holding a press conference to get Dinolfo to do something — anything– about the immediate threat?”
Or more importantly: “Why hasn’t Dinolfo taken down people’s personal data yet? If all it needed was Tom Hasman contacting her, why hasn’t a letter, calls from the media, press conferences, and news reports spurred her into action?”
She’s backed into a corner now– if she takes down the data she protects our personal data, but is admitting Tom Hasman was right. It looks like she’d rather play politics herself than admit that she made a mistake.
The final straw in the WHAM13 news report was Carroll and the anchor repeatedly trying to minimize the issue. Paraphrasing:
It’s only a few documents. Less than 1% of the 15 million documents on the site.
Now would be a good time to remember that 100,000 documents is a lot of Social Security numbers.
I was having a conversation with some folks today about local news coverage, and they were saying how great Sean is, with a chorus of agreement, but then (and I wasn’t saying anything, BTW), they said, “Except what was up with that story he did about the Social Security numbers on the County Clerk’s website?”
Someone made a joke about how Dinolfo must’ve bought his lunch or coffee or something.
Yeesh. Rottenchester has a piece up on Sean showing “some surprising bias” on an interview with Randy Kuhl (R-NY 29th). Sean, what’s going on? You’re better than this!
[...] is this risky? Because Rochester’s traditional media has been largely deferential to the incumbent clerk, and will likely ignore this initiative from the Hasman campaign. The [...]