UPDATED VERSION!

Rebecca Green from the Journal Gazette wrote an interesting piece on Ron Mowery, the Grant County Coroner who was ultimately responsible for the now infamous VanRyn/Cerak mixup debacle.

In every way possible, Mowery takes his responsibility head-on, and leaves little question that he feels totally at-fault and extremely bad about the whole situation. Takes a big man to say those kinds of things on the record…IMHO.

BUT, that certainly doesn’t stop Rebecca Green from taking a few pot shots at his credentials!

“He said he has completed the state coroner’s association training but has not done any other work toward certification, nor does he plan to do so. He said he found out early on in his partial term he was not cut out for the job, and was much better able to handle the law enforcement components.”

Now, I understand that this is information provided by Mowery, but any journalist worth their salt would realize that the inclusion of this information is not only impertinent, but actually mean-spirited, in light of the magnitude of the situation as a whole. If a person has already apologized and admitted their culpability, why is it necessary to publicly berate them and paint them as an incompetent slack-jaw?

I’d be interested to know, Rebecca. Were you just trying to fill page space? Were you trying to fuel the fires of a potential lawsuit to give yourself something to write about in the future? There are a host of reasons for providing this irrelevant information (and YES, it is totally irrelevant because we already know that Mowery is a partial-term fill-in Coroner), and NONE of the reasons are well-intentioned or innocent in their origins.

Tsk tsk.

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