Award Winning "News" Paper Reporters in Havre

The Havre Daily “News” never fails to make me shake my head in wonder. Take the above the fold article in tonight’s paper for instance. The headline reads “Dow vs. Kaul in closely watched Ward 3 race”. At first blush it looks like another award winning article like we have become accustomed to from the professional and investigative journalists at the HDN. It has some questions and what we would assume to be the factual reporting of answers from the candidates. There is even a nice picture of incumbent councilman Kaul in his shiny black cowboy hat and a picture of Dow with no hat (and no hair either for that matter)

Who?  Me?

First I really don’t know how closely this race is being watched. There are only a few more than 900 people in all of Havre that are even eligible to vote for either candidate. Assuming a higher than normal turnout because of the mail-in ballot I would guess that the return would run around half of the ballots being actually voted so in reality 226 people could very well determine the outcome of this election. That is why it is so important for people in Ward 3 to actually take the time to return a voted ballot.

After the cutesy first paragraph trying to compare this local council race to the presidential election investigative reporter Zach White writes that;

“Kaul has served two terms already, first getting elected in the 2003 council election. He has served as the chair of the city’s Safety Committee and advocated for the expansion of the hours at the port of entry at Wild Horse.”

It wasn’t long after the newspaper hit the stands that the Corrector started receiving e-mails from folks “correcting” some of the facts. Early this afternoon one of our readers wrote in an e-mail to us that;

“The Chamber of Commerce has had a committee that has pushed for the expansion of the Wild Horse Port to 24-hour status for several years and I can empathically state that Bob Kaul is not a part of our committee. What Bob Kaul has done is start a separate group along with Bob Sivertson, Jim Treperenus and others of like ilk that have muddled the whole process by only asking for expansion of port hours to 18 hours which would do nothing for what we are trying to accomplish which is make Wild Horse a commercial 24 hour crossing. Bob Kaul’s group has hindered our work to make this a commercial crossing where people can import and export the same as they do at Sweet Grass.”

Later tonight we also received two more e-mails stating that Kaul’s tenure reported in the HDN was also false. One reader even went so far as to say he posted a comment on the online Havre Daily “News” pointing out that fact and his comment was never posted but miraculously the copy of the online version of the paper was changed to correct the unreliable reporting. This reader also went on to say that he then posted the following on the HDN face book page and his comment was also quickly removed by the newspaper

“The errors in this article are unbelievable. Kaul hasn’t served on the council since 2003 as he said in this interview. He ran for office in 2005 against Kaftan and was beat handily. He filed for the seat again in 2007 and only got the council position because absolutely no one can against him. No one has ever ever elected him to anything. Why would we elect him again when he doesn’t even know how many years he has been on the council? Either dementia is setting in or the newspaper again screwed up the facts”

While it is true that the Corrector has taken the paper to task in the past these “tips” we were receiving just seemed too far-fetched to be true so we did a little investigating of our own and these assertions all appear to be true. The online HDN article is indeed different than the print article in the newspaper lying here on my desk. I wonder what else is inaccurate in this article? I guess I could give reporter Zack White some leniency here as he has only been in Havre a short time and wouldn’t have the historical election knowledge to know something was amiss but from where did he glean these misrepresentations of the facts? As near as we can determine candidate Kaul told him these things in the interview. Is Kaul trying to pull something over on his constituents or is he really suffering from dementia as our reader asserts and doesn't even know when he was first seated on the council?

We at the Corrector have made no secret that we think councilman Kaul has got to go and we are allowed that liberty as we are an opinion driven blog but is the actual “News” paper now resorting to twisting the facts to assure that Kaul is reelected? It would sure appear so.

A big THANK YOU to those that took the time to send us these corrections. Don’t forget that we love to receive your tips and information at - havredailycorrector@gmail.com  and if you live in Ward 3 PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE don’t forget to vote