Newspaper's unethical practices are harmful

For years I have sat by and only voiced my opinion of the paper's ethics and insensitivity to my friends and neighbors. I find your yellow journalism deplorable. From the onset of my move here years ago with the very insensitive picture of the 14-year-old boy whose trapped, badly burned body was displayed on the back page of the paper, to the numerous times obituaries contained the deceased person's past legal history to the recent headlines of the Carthage Central coach, I have sat by.

No more. If these articles are your feeble attempts to embarrass the offender, defer such behavior in others or sell more papers, you are dead wrong with your tactics. I am not defending the subject or your reporting of the incident; that is on him. What I am trying to point out is there are many other people who are often hurt and/or negatively affected by your insensitive reporting. This puts a black eye to a fine school, his co-workers and especially his students. As sad as this is to say, kids are more insensitive than your paper's editors; perhaps they learned it from you. These students will more than likely be harassed, teased and goaded during their sports season, all because you flashed the offender's affiliation with the school.

Hopefully this will be shared with your other editors. This type of reporting is unfair to all the other people whose lives are touched by this person and who had no part in his incident. I hope when you go to bed tonight you will give some thought to reporting only the facts of an incident and not expound upon their place of employment, their past history or any other information totally unrelated to the incident.

I am sure there is more to the paper's unethical practices as well as I am a personal friend of two of your very, very good past reporters who left their employment with your paper because they would not follow your directions to seek out additional stories that delved into the personal life of a deceased individual. Let people rest in peace; the past part of their life is over and as for the others, their hell has begun — their families, friends, co-workers and students, etc., do not need to be spotlighted too.

You may very well be saying to yourself, she does not have to read the article if she doesn't want to. And so right you are, so please cancel the balance of my subscription and refund to me the balance in my easy pay account.

Barbara Allington

Carthage