Your feature article of July 4 titled, “All day, all night: A YMCA in Santa Ynez wants to stay open 24/7, but its neighbors are against the plan,” by Taylor O’Connor is very one-sided, whether intended or not.
Most of the article focuses primarily on the reasons why it is a good idea to convert the facility to 24/7 operations, including an opinion presented by a community person with a medical condition, who coincidentally is also a YMCA board member. You also present quotes by the YMCA executive director and by the chief operating officer for the Channel Islands YMCA. No objective source of community support for this proposal was presented in the article.
On the other side, the breadth of opinions opposing the merits of 24/7 operation are only briefly mentioned in your article. The reason the author gives is that responses to inquiries for opposing opinions from YMCA neighbors were not received by the publishing deadline. Here’s a reporting idea: Change the deadline to make sure that you report all the relevant facts and opinions.
But you actually already had access to the opposing opinions, and you did not report them! You correctly reported that the Santa Barbara County Planning Commission unanimously voted to push its decision back to August. Therefore, you knew that there was a public meeting wherein opposing opinions were submitted, in writing, to the Planning Commission as a matter of public record—all before you wrote this article.
However, you failed to report to readers those opposing opinions. I will not enumerate the extensive list of opposing concerns here—you owed that to your readership in the original piece! Was that lazy reporting, or biased reporting? It certainly was not reporting the whole story.
You owe it to your readers to run another story with an equal position in the paper, with an equal headline, that reports the whole story.
Steve Cullen
Solvang
