“Just the facts, ma’am,” Joe Friday taught us.

The earliest visitors to this page last week will recall that I published a couple of photos of the construction work in progress on the former Switlik estate. I was asked to take them down to protect the new owner’s privacy.

Should I or should I not?

That essential question makes a nice jumping off point to consider how the Main Stream Media twists the news by not publishing it.

My friend “Rufus” started discussing “balanced” reporting. I now call him “Rufus” because I discovered I know too many people named Bob, Jim, and Jim-Bob. He observed that the published reports on auto sales included numbers for BMW, Ford, Honda, Mazda, Toyota, VW, and so on but none of the summaries had GM sales figures.

I believe, Rufus wrote, that there is a massive opportunity for a news organization to rise to pre-eminence by providing rigidly balanced reporting, and making sure it is clear exactly how the rest of the MSM is NOT, I suspect that they would pick up a pile of advertising support from businesses. WSJ is too clearly conservative and vested, and especially too much associated with big money and, well, Wall Street. It has to be someone else, and it can’t be a right-wing ranter. It has to be known for taking both sides to task and exposing their underbellies.

Alrighty, then.

Tell me who decides what stories they “rigidly balancedly” report.

Tell me why you think they would pick up advertising support.

Advertisers go where the potential buyers hang out, Rufus. Advertisers pay the bills. Advertisers have almost no (commercial) interest in what programming they buy beyond the demographics of the audience.

There are some exceptions. Hallmark, for example, remains the producer and primary underwriter for the Hall of Fame which is, I believe, the longest running anthology program on television. Maybe the longest running program of any kind on television. Hall of Fame airs before holidays for the obvious reason. There has never been a downbeat program or one that glorifies bad acts.

So, Hallmark does control content. Many other companies won’t sponsor spokesmen who do crimes — the Michael Phelps bong kerfuffle illustrates that — but Rufus really needs only to look at the Nielsens for the news programs; the newsie advertiser list shows how little most sponsors care.

Taking the sides to task, see, that’s not reporting. Reporting is much more banal than that. Reporting has no agenda to take a side to task. 60 Minutes does that sort of “ambush journalism” and, other than Andy Rooney, I often do not like 60 Minutes. They do ferret out facts but they edit deeply to tell the story most likely to jack us up, not simply to publish the facts.

People asking for “balanced reporting” really want complete reportage of the facts of the story they want the media to carry and only that story.

Well, if there is information to bash and support both sides of an issue, Rufus wrote, that would be a heluva start.

See, that’s still opinion writing, not journalism. Just like science, there are no sides in journalism; there are only facts. A fact has no sides.

Stay tuned. Next up: the effects of not publishing some of the news and my application for a job with the White House.

I made a mistake.

It was an honest mistake as opposed to a dishonest one, as if that makes a difference; it was an error in fact in this very blog.

Here’s the back story.

In a blog titled “For Sale, Cheap,” I wrote about Craigslist scams and the experience I had had selling a car and buying a refrigerator through that list. As my friend “Bob” said, “$1,200 is too much for a fridge. $3,000 is mindless.” I agree wholeheartedly so I bought a far cheaper new-to-me fridge and I spun a column out of the experience.

Nothing ever goes quite as planned, I wrote then. Prescient, I am.

The fridge was in the Stanley Switlik estate. That marvelous site boasts some of the most beautiful Marathon acreage. The former owner of the refrigerator told me she was moving because “D’Asign Source had bought the property for development.” I included that tidbit in the story. In fact, I wrote that they would tear down the mansion and build condos. None of that was important to the story itself except it added some local color.

[Photos Removed]

Terri Nuechterlein, Director of Marketing for D’Asign Source, brought me up short.

“D’Asign Source did not buy the old Switlik property,” she wrote as a comment. “We were hired to design and build a private home for the person who did purchase the property. You will be pleased to know there are no plans for condos.”

I am indeed.

D’Asign Source is a Marathon success story. Owned by a local family and a major local employer, they have grown in half a century from a modest concrete business to a significant building, interior design, and landscaping company that has changed the architectural face of the Keys. The family “wants their projects to be right for our area,” Ms. Nuechterlein said. I am personally fond of one of those projects, the ten unit Turtle Cays condos in Key Colony Beach. These units evoke the wood frame look of the old Florida Keys and make excellent use of a long, narrow lot. The yearly D’Asign Source landscape tour benefits Pigeon Key. They host the annual Habitat for Humanity fundraiser. They also donated the recyclable and reusable construction materiel to the Habitat for Humanity store. Good company. Good people.

The Switlik property sold for $7 million last November and the 1956 home is now gone. “It really was not in the best repair anymore,” Ms. Nuechterlein told me. The estate will become “a great private compound for a lucky family and plenty of friends!” That lucky family has “expressed an interest in several green initiatives.” The staged project will be completed in about two years.

Three hundred fifty word back story.

I write this blog as a hobby but that doesn’t negate my responsibility to check facts. I do, after all, include straight reportage as the underpinning of every opinion I write.

Fact checking is more important to the reader than to the writer or publisher. Oh, sure, the publisher wants to avoid serious, costly difficulties such as the disbelief, suspicion, and lawsuits that surrounded the high profile fraud of Dan Rather or Stephen Glass. The reader needs to believe that the words are accurate. After all, “It’s on the Internet so it must be true” is today’s mantra.

Ever wonder what moved the media far from the yellow journalism that sold so many newspapers for William Randolph Hearst? Fact checkers.

I believe that most newspapers have eliminated the position of fact checker, just as most newspapers have eliminated the position of copy editor. The cost of those positions was more than advertisers were willing to bear. It means that reporters must verify the information they publish. And that means you, dear reader, must now verify the information you see or hear.

Verification is a three-step process. The viewer or reader needs to derive if a piece is opinion or news. That is no small task even on a news program. Next the viewer or reader needs to determine if the story is complete or is slanted by omission. Finally the viewer or reader needs to decide the accuracy of each statement presented as fact.

“Just the facts, ma’am,” Joe Friday taught us. Fact checking requires quick and accurate research. I didn’t do that and for that I apologize to my readers and to D’Asign Source. I’ll do better.

Quite a project, I said this morning to one of the site workers on the estate.

“You ain’t seen nothing yet.”

“Come writers and critics. Who prophesize with your pen. And keep your eyes wide. The chance won’t come again …” The Seattle Post-Intelligencer has dropped its print edition and become an Internet-only entity. The “P-I” is the largest American paper to do so.

OK, OK. This year it’s the “The Pee Eyes, They Are A Changin’.” It won’t be until next year that The Times gets to changin’. Sorry, Mr. Dylan.

There is good news and bad news in this story.

The bad news is quite simple.

P-I owner Hearst Newspapers has dumped about 145 employees (they all did get some kind of severance but they are out of work). The new P-I site won’t need them. See, they are out of the news business and into the opinion business.

Oh, they won’t fess up to that but let’s take a look at how the opinion pages work in a newspaper. Big national papers like the New York Times or Wall Street Journal invite major government officials, A-list actors, and Nobel Laureates to write op-ed columns for their pages. Medium sized regional papers like the Detroit Free Press or the Seattle Post-Intelligencer have to go to the second team for opinion writers. They get mayors and dog catchers and writers like me to opine.

The new P I dot com has recruited some current and former government officials, including a former mayor, a former police chief, and the (not-yet) former Seattle school superintendent, to write columns (we call them blogs in the trade). It will create pages for some of the print edition’s more popular columnists and bloggers. And it will also update its pages for the legion of (unpaid) local bloggers who already work for them for free.

Oops. Sorry. Former mayors and dog catchers and writers like me.

Nowhere in that list are any actual reporters. Nowhere in that list are any editors. Nowhere in that list are any fact checkers.

The bad news is this: American readers have a belief that “if it’s in the paper, it must be true.” Newspapers have polished that belief with staffs of reporters, editors, and fact checkers.

The “demise of the great American newspaper” isn’t looming as we lose advertising and move onto the Internet. That’s just a problem for the wood pulp industry. The demise of the great American newspaper came when newspaper management decided opinion was interchangeable with fact.

I said at the beginning that there would be good news and bad news in this story. Let me know when you find the good news.