The letter to the editor which is printed in today's Knoxville News Sentinel is misplaced by being printed in the daily paper. It is a letter written to Mayor Burchett not the Editor or the general public. The tone of arrogance by the writer proclaiming his position with a state run school is nothing more than a self serving ploy. The letter is an attempt by Jack McElroy to justify his careless actions of publishing private financial bank records without revealing how they were obtained.
Note that as one commenter pointed out the professor is in the same department as Mark Harmon. Is that right.
ReplyDeleteI also find it worth noting that at no time does the knowledgeable professor describe any laws that Burchett may be up against in requesting this material.
And that "charge" is just made up.
KNS realizes there is an exception to the shield law that will compel them to release information if it will assist in identifying a person who may have committed a crime (misdemeanor or felony) and the KNS editorial board, publisher, and editor should have known better than to publish images of checks it should not have had in the first place.
ReplyDeleteThe biggest problem is McElroy isn't very smart (he works for Scripps not Gannett)and their hatchet job may come back to bite them hard, resulting in a well written opinion which opens up a number of sources to discovery. Not that the KNS has many sources anyway, most of what they write is just jibberish from the "spokesperson" for the local government official, however, when they go off on a tangent like the Burchette check story, look what happens.