Down River

By John Lipez

The Best We Can:
The Fourth of July holiday, falling on a Tuesday, has skewed The Record’s printing schedule for this week, so we’ve all been scurrying about to get things done before our print deadline which came about way too soon.

Given that, Down River may be a bit more rambling than usual, but you may not be able to tell the difference. Let’s find out, because this is an important topic.

As for a recent misguided broadside from the outside on the integrity of the journalistic standards at The Record, we’re pretty comfortable in writing that The Record is fiercely independent of ever cow- towing to elected officials at any level.

This writer has been directly involved in what goes into The Record for better than 30 years so can’t make a definitive judgment on what may have transpired in the county’s oldest paper in the previous 120 years or so. But it is suspected that previous owners, from Ron Dremel all the way back to the Smythe family, subscribed to the same standards of independence and fairness.

A couple media-related anecdotes come to mind:

The late Buck O’Reilly (with whom Down River entered into a purchase agreement with then-owner Ron Dremel a few decades back) left no doubt about integrity on the front page. He told the story of how his late father, Frank D. O’Reilly II, would not play favorites for anyone, any time.

Buck, in his youthful days, had the misfortune of driving his car into a telephone pole somewhere in the vicinity of Spring and Fourth Streets in Lock Haven. The young Mr. O’Reilly then went home and went to bed, if Down River’s memory is correct. Needless to say, the crash caught the eye of city police and became a news story. The O’Reilly family-owned Express didn’t hesitate to give the incident the appropriate coverage in the paper’s next edition. .

And there was this when Down River, many, many years ago, used to faithfully cover meetings of the Clinton County Commissioners, held in one of the back rooms of the county courthouse. Down River would hustle back to radio station WBPZ and put the story on the noon local news then head home for lunch.

On more than one occasion, the phone would ring and it would be the late County Commissioner Carl Kephart. The county’s longtime minority commissioner was a longtime friend (along with his late wife Esther) of the Lipez family, always was and always would be.

But commissioner Kephart sometimes had a difference of opinion on how the news was reported on WBPZ and in those lunchtime calls didn’t hesitate to share his views in no uncertain terms. This fledgling reporter politely listened and calmly offered a defense as to the details on how that particular story came to be. By the time our conversation was done, Mr. Kephart appeared to be pacified, the story stayed on the newscasts and there was never a grudge held.

Is the local media perfect? Down River can only speak for the years WBPZ and then WSNU had a fulltime news director and the several decades with The Record. Nope, not perfect. But the effort has always been towards fairness. That has not changed under the direction of new Record owner Michael Frank the last three years.

The Record is proud of its journalistic effort in our community. Most people with an unbiased view, we believe, would agree that The Record/the record-online is sensitive to reporting news not sensationally, but fairly and in a timely, responsible manner.

Others may take issue with that view, this in a challenging time in the world of journalism, where politicians love to take pot-shots at the media. But we’re here, our hide is tough, our journalistic standards remain high, and we’re good to go for the next 150 years or so.