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Reporter’s Notebook June 6, 2016

Written By: Robert Cox

NEW ROCHELLE, NY — A few months ago, walking along North Avenue near New Rochelle High School, I came across a crumbling wall, eroded by the stream below, poised to take out the entire sidewalk and possibly a chunk of North Avenue. I took some photos and sent them to City Manager. Within a matter of days, a Parks Department crew shored up the wall (photo montage above).

Governor Cuomo retweeted a tweet by the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation. The tweet promoted New York State’s “Climate Smart Communities” which are “leading by example” by deploying Electric Vehicles into their fleets with the hashtag #NYActsOnClimate. The tweet included a photo of New Rochelle’s Hybrid Electric Garbage Truck.

The problem with that is the New Rochelle’s Hybrid Electric Garbage Truck was a total bust and after spending about $200,000 was not able to run on electric power. The truck was left to run for years on diesel fuel. Shortly after this tweet ran, the City of New Rochelle DPW decommissioned the vehicle and it is no longer in service.

A reader sent along a Facebook exchange about my reporting on the students who caused a lockdown/lockout the other day at New Rochelle High School. There is a lengthy exchange about the incident which took place between 11 am and 2 pm.

I published an article about the incident at 8:13 pm. At 8:24 pm a person posted my article on the incident generating a discussion about my reporting. I point that out because in the meantime there had been reports published or broadcast on other media outlets that contained various inaccuracies.

My article is based the following: having been on scene, continuously monitored the scanner traffic, spoken with students, staff, security guards and police who were directly involved in the incident and obtaining public records (arrest-related). I live-tweeted photos from the scene. It took several hours for me to gather information for my article. The article is entirely accurate in all the particulars.

The exchange that interested me is between a woman who cannot imagine students hitting and spitting on police officers and another woman who, she says, normally likes what I write. We will see what happens in court but there is video tape and one of the students was criminally charged. Both News12 and I reported that the police placed spitting nets over the girls because they were spitting on police officers.

The woman  responds that my article is “slander”. I have the police reports and truth is an absolute defense against defamation (and it would not be “slander” because slander is spoken, it would be libel because libel is published and I published the article),

She questions that quality of my reporting because I wrote about “three students” and then “two students”. She must not have ready the article closely because I make clear that at first three students attempted to intervene at the House 1 office but one left the scene when directed to do so by security guards so while initially there were three in the end there were two students attempting to intervene for the student that was in the House 1 office.

She says my article was “obviously” rushEd and “NOT fact checked well”. As I said, the article was published after 8 p.m. for an incident that concluded at 2 p.m. and long after every major media outlet in the area had already reported on the story (and reported various inaccuracies — such as that the incident was related to a large fight earlier in the day).

She says my article is “shameful” because the article “has a lot of assumptions written in context as fact”. I am not sure exactly what that means but my article is meticulously sourced and backed up with public records.

What caught my eye was the “appeal to authority” contained in the article.

She begins her reply, in a post made about 9:15 p.m., by chastising the previous commenter who mentioned the hitting and spitting on police officers.

“Were you there???? No.”

Later in the same post she writes: “I was there today.”

So, she was there and the commenter was not and by extension she knows everything and so when she says my article is slanderous, not fact-checked, rushed, full of assumptions and so on its because she was there and knows exactly what happened. She knows and I don’t.

The only problem with this is that the internet never forgets. At 2:30 p.m., about 30 minutes after the incident ended the same woman wrote:

“Wait until you hear what happened before jumping to conclusions. I personally know nothing at the moment, but will find out more later.”

Immediately after the incident concluded she states emphatically “I personally know nothing at the moment.” but seven hours later she writes “I was there today.”

So, which is it? She was an eyewitness or she knew nothing? Sounds like the latter. In either case, the story I wrote IS accurate.

Meanwhile, someone purporting to be a family member threatned to file a lawsuit against Talk of the Sound if we did not remove the story. That made four such threats in a matter of a week for different articles people did not like. People make these sorts of threats all the time. As readers know, I do not respond well to such threats. The stories remain.