John is one of my frequent emailers who takes issue with our coverage or with actions of one of the community’s governing bodies on occasion. He’s a careful news peruser and is usually correct in the points he makes. Here’s what he wrote today:
“Peterjohn garners 55% of the votes to Winters’ 41%, and the Eagle headlines this at the top of Page 1A as overwhelming. Marcey Gregory gets 60% of the vote in the #3 district commission race. That seems to be slightly more overwhelming by at least 2 percentage points. Kelly Arnold gets 58% of the vote in the race for county Clerk, and the Eagle says he won easily, and placed that opinion on Page 6A. Jim Ryun - behind by the still unsettled bid for the 2nd district congressional race was simply in trouble. In fact, by the time that edition of the paper was written, Ryun was behind. Why not just state the vote numbers and percentages and let your readers decide is a man who lost by 107 votes is merely in trouble, or factually out of the game?
Jim Slattery got 69% of the vote in the senate race. Ty Masterson got 60% in his race. Oletha Faust-Goudeau received 71% of the votes in District 29, and Carolyn McGinn got a whopping 83 in District 31, and Steve Abrams got 60% of Distric 32’s votes. Why aren’t these over-whelming numbers?”
John, I get to disagree this time! We didn’t characterize the vote margin as overwhelming. Our headline said that Peterjohn overwhelmed his opponent, using the word as a verb, not an adjective describing the vote totals.
OK, that’s splitting hairs. But a 14-percentage point win is not winning overwhelmingly? Doesn’t seem like an opinion to me, but I guess it could be if you were expecting a 30-point win and thought you squeaked one out. I’ll invite Michael Roehrman, our deputy editor/production, to share his two-cents’ worth also.