Viewer’s Voice

It has been an historic week in our nation.  A new president has taken office which means we in broadcasting have a whole group of new names go get used to. 

But on Viewer’s Voice, something else gets people excited and it’s how we cover some stories.

We did a story on the vandals who struck at a church in Wayne County. They scrawled graffiti using a racial slur to talk about Barrack Obama.
   
Well one caller said, we, the media was the problem for reporting the incident, “It just seems to hurt everybody and help no one.  And I just think this is where the media takes advantage of people being bigoted and all that. And the media makes it worse.”
   
Well, we certainly don’t mean to make it worse, but we believe since it was something people throughout the area could see, it was important to cover.
 
And a number of people took exception with the way we referred to the new President after his inauguration.

Kathy Glover wrote, “This morning, I heard your news anchor refer to President Obama as “Mr. Obama.  We only have one president at a time. Please refer to him using his proper title, “President Obama.”
And Jackie Joiner had the same thing to say about how I referred to the President, “Let us give President Obama the same respect we gave to President Bush, President Clinton and all our other presidents.  President Obama’s vision is for our country to unite as one and I hope that is the vision of your newscasters. Just show our President respect.”

The fact is, over the years, I have referred to all of our presidents the same way.  And in fact we have a guide that is accepted by all the media.
   
We always refer to the President as president the first time.  “Mr.“ can be used after that and we may use only the last name when referring to a policy, such as “the Bush administration”.
   
By the way, “President”, ‘Mr.‘ and even “Ms.“ in the case of Bev Perdue are alls signs of respect for the office and aren’t used to refer to everyone.