Re: “,” July 5 Jeremy Meyer column.
Jeremy Meyer’s longstanding animus against the Douglas County School Board jumped the shark in this column. His ridiculous claim we tried to exclude him from “secret meetings” is belied by his own past reporting.
I e-mailed Meyer, asking what he meant by “secret meetings.” He sent me a Nov. 12, 2010, article about a board retreat written before the retreat occurred. Some secret.
It gets better. In Meyer’s Denver Post story about a “secret meeting,” he wrote: “Douglas County School District officials say an unexpected level of interest in a retreat exploring school choice … is forcing them to add an overflow room and a video feed to allow the public to watch the discussion.”
Let’s review the bidding. Meyer is complaining about being excluded from a “secret meeting” (i) about which he wrote before it occurred and (ii) that was so widely publicized it required an overflow room to accommodate the public and the press. Not since Maxwell Smart deployed the “Cone of Silence” has a secret been so loudly broadcast.
There is one kernel of accuracy amid the cacophony of Meyer’s truthiness. Meyer did bitterly complain about his seat location in the meeting. We accommodated him. We have no record any “media attorneys” were involved in negotiating such weighty matters of public policy as a news reporter’s seating preference.
Meyer also claims a district spokeswoman urged him to delay some unspecified story. That’s news to us. But Meyer’s readers might want to know that that spokeswoman later left the district and stood as a union-backed board candidate in the next election. Gee, I wonder why she would do something truly secretive and contrary to the board’s interests.
Finally, Meyer’s claim the board avoided the media is only partially true. We avoided him. We did so for reasons now evident in his column. He wasn’t a fair reporter. He was biased.
If there’s a scandal exposed by Meyer’s column, that’s it.
Doug Benevento is vice president of the Douglas County School District’s Board of Education.
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