{"id":18049,"date":"2014-10-28T07:27:48","date_gmt":"2014-10-28T11:27:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/?p=18049"},"modified":"2014-10-28T09:05:40","modified_gmt":"2014-10-28T13:05:40","slug":"no-aaron-woolf-ncpr-did-not-make-your-closing-argument","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/2014\/10\/28\/no-aaron-woolf-ncpr-did-not-make-your-closing-argument\/","title":{"rendered":"No, Aaron Woolf, NCPR did not make your closing argument"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Aaron<\/a>

Aaron Woolf. Photo: Woolf Campaign, via Facebook<\/p><\/div>\n

The last week or so, Democrat Aaron Woolf has been making a lot of hay out of NCPR’s in-depth political profile of his opponent, Republican Elise Stefanik.\u00a0 This isn’t anything particularly new.\u00a0 Candidates often use press reports in their campaigns.\u00a0\u00a0 One of our earlier reports was translated into a TV ad by Republican Matt Doheny in the GOP congressional primary.<\/p>\n

But because Mr. Woolf has been leaning so heavily on that one single bit of journalism<\/a> — blasting it to voters in paid Facebook spam and even making it the focus of interviews with journalists<\/a> — it’s important for us to talk a bit about this and explain to our audiences the huge difference between what we’re doing and what the Democratic candidate is doing.<\/p>\n

NCPR is charged with an overarching mission:\u00a0 We inform our audiences so that they can make their own decisions about things like who should represent the North Country in Congress.\u00a0 Yes, we reported that there are discrepancies between Ms. Stefanik’s portrayal of her life history and the record we were able to compile of her actual resume.<\/p>\n

But we also found that her career has been an extraordinarily accomplished one for a political activist of any age, let alone one so young.\u00a0 We found that she enjoys the kinds of relationships and connections in Washington DC that may serve the North Country well, especially within a Republican majority, if she’s elected to the House.<\/p>\n

In fact we have worked over weeks and months to offer a detailed, three-dimensional portrait of all three candidates in this important race.\u00a0 We haven’t played “gotcha.”\u00a0 We haven’t portrayed any of these candidates as white knights or villains.<\/p>\n

Again, none of Aaron Woolf’s heavy-handed reliance on a single NCPR report, stripped of its nuance, is new.\u00a0 Politics is politics.\u00a0 While our job is to inform you, Mr. Woolf’s job is to convince voters to give him a second look, using any tool he can find.<\/p>\n

But it’s still necessary for us to point out that we don’t approve.\u00a0 And in the end, we believe it’s always best for politicians to use their own words, their own arguments, their own policy proposals, to convince people that they deserve to win elections.<\/p>\n

The one positive here is that it may lead some folks to examine our actual reporting in its totality<\/a>.\u00a0 We hope you’ll do that.\u00a0 The truth is that we’re not making Aaron Woolf’s closing arguments, but we are offering people in the North Country a thorough, comprehensive, and compelling journalistic record.<\/p>\n

We hope it will help you enter the ballot box a little bit better prepared.\u00a0\u00a0 Click here to start reading<\/a>.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The last week or so, Democrat Aaron Woolf has been making a lot of hay […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[13570,6862,20],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18049"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=18049"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18049\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18055,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18049\/revisions\/18055"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=18049"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=18049"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=18049"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}