DAILY TIMES, SARAH LAKE AGAIN SHOWS ANTI-COUNCIL BIAS
SALISBURY, MD – This morning the Daily Times’ Sarah Lake reports that the city will adopt a standardized policy to permit uniformed Salisbury police officers to perform security duties at local businesses. Reading the article one comes away believing that the administration of Salisbury mayor Jim Ireton and his police chief Barbara Duncan came up with this policy and are waiting for the city council to approve it.
This is why you should question everything printed in the DT, particularly if written by Ms. Lake.
The concept of a policy, which will be drafted by the Salisbury Police Department and presented to the City Council for approval, is derived from negotiations with Wal-Mart for Black Friday security. Near identical memorandums of understanding drafted for Wal-Mart and for a 2009 agreement with The Centre at Salisbury will be used as templates.
"The main thrust of the policy is if we’re going to have more requests like this in the future, we won’t have to go to the council every time, particularly if we’re going to use the original agreement we reached with The Centre at Salisbury as a model," said City Administrator John Pick.
What Lake leaves out is that the idea for a standardized policy came from the council, particularly councilwoman Debbie Campbell. Actually, we’re confident that is WHY Lake left that little tidbit out. She even misreports that the policy is to be derived from the city’s agreement with the Centre at Salisbury. She appears to deliberately do so in order to include an irrelevant mention of Salisbury Wal-Mart asset protection manager Muir Boda.
While Lake chooses to make a mountain of council’s request that an approval come from a business’s owners or corporate headquarters, she deliberately leaves out the reasons why – to protect the city from potential liability.
When Lake, and the newspaper she works for, insist on being participants in the political process rather than reporters of news we must ask if having a daily newspaper as biased and flawed as the Daily Times is really a community asset or simply a propaganda tool for the city’s elite.
NOTE – SPD chief Barbara Duncan has acted in a totally above-board manner in this matter. Mention of her in this op-ed should not be interpreted to mean that she is directly involved in the sweetheart deal between the Daily Times, Ireton, and other political opponents of the Salisbury council majority. This also applies to our mention of Mr. Boda.
