On a weekend leading up to what is probably one of the most critical election days in recent history, the Bee decides instead to sink to a new tawdry low. I refer to the front page article taking up more than half the space on February 3 which in shameful yellow journalism style delves into the internal strife of the Shehady family and considers Super Tuesday nothing but a sidebar. What I also find reprehensible is the embarrassing swipe the Bee takes at a local community businessman in the centennial of his life. Why the Bee deemed it necessary to literally hang out the dirty laundry concerning Mr. Larry Shehady I find beyond contempt. Is it possible the Bee was the unwitting rube in a hatchet job of someone's vendetta or worse? This story does not concern a politician, celebrity or someone else considered in the public eye, and yet the Bee treats it as if it were about Britney Spears. Seriously, do your writers have not the creativity to find something better and more important to report on? The Bee has once again proved it is a hick newspaper, but this time with the shoddiness of a gossip tabloid.
-- Rick Flores
This raises one of the most difficult, and eternal, questions in journalism: When does an individual's story become a matter of public interest?
We don't make these decisions lightly. But we consider the story of a legal battle between the wife and sons of Larry Shehady to be a legitimate -- and important -- subject for a news story.
In part this is because Shehady is a long-time community leader. As a 100-year-old man who built a business empire, as a philanthropist, his affairs are -- for good or ill -- of interest to many readers. Anyone who has sought out success in a public arena recognizes that it carries with it a certain amount of attention that lesser mortals need not worry about.
(Further evidence of this is seen in the statistics we gather showing which stories are most popular on fresnobee.com. "Fracture in the family" had an unusually high number of hits on Sunday and remains on our top-five list a day later -- a sign of an unusually strong reader response.)
Beyond this, however, the story is the public's business because it involves a public agency spending public resources to take action in a public forum -- the courts.
As for the suggestion that we should have devoted more of the front page to Tuesday's primary, I must point out that we have had stories about the primary on the front page virtually every day for weeks -- including on Sunday. I think a fair analysis of our coverage would conclude that it has been more than thorough.
