The Free Press, Mankato, MN

Editorials

Related Photos

  • Joe Spear — managing editor

    spear, joe 2007.jpg

August 27, 2010

Editor's column: Brady's arrest fuels emotions

By Joe Spear Free Press Managing Editor

There’s no shortage of opinion or emotion to Tuesday’s story on Mankato Mayor John Brady being arrested for drunken driving in the Twin Cities.

The community reaction has ranged from calls for resignation to calls for forgiveness and sympathy. As a newspaper we must deal in clarifying as many facts as possible, playing the story in an evenhanded way and being fair.

Sometimes that takes a while to come about. We need more than one story. The trickling out of information will keep the story in the headlines days, weeks, months.

We became aware of the story when Fox 9 news reporters from the Twin Cities showed up at Monday’s Mankato City Council meeting to get a reaction from council members about the arrest. Council members didn’t seem to know a thing about it, though it happened two days earlier, and Brady missed his plane for a his city-sponsored economic development trip to China.

The Free Press was unaware of the incident because it happened in Golden Valley, a police jurisdiction that is far out of our coverage area. There are a number of scenarios that are possible on how Twin Cities television got the story; they could have simply been going through Golden Valley police reports and recalled the name John Brady in Mankato as the mayor.

When public figures such as mayors or governors get into trouble, it’s news because of who they are, not necessarily because of the crime they are accused of. In fact, The Free Press and many other news organizations don’t routinely report all drunken-driving convictions.

Some readers assumed we were somehow protecting Brady for one reason or another as part of the “good ol’ boys” network in Mankato. That’s certainly not the case. Clearly, we consider it news. We did a first-day story in Tuesday’s edition, a followup on Wednesday, a short wire story on Thursday and three stories in Friday’s edition. We’ll be continuing to cover the case.

Others wondered why we didn’t use Brady’s booking photo in Wednesday’s story while other news organizations did. We had requested the photo from authorities, but they didn’t return our calls. And while someone did e-mail us a mug, we could not verify at the time it was the picture taken by authorities. We don’t run photos if we don’t know where they came from. We were just not comfortable running with something we couldn’t verify as the true photo.

Some expect the newspaper to possibly call for his resignation. To make that decision, we need more information and we need to hear from Brady himself.

There are many things troubling about this incident, however. Residents have told us they’re concerned that Brady continued on with his trip to China, that he didn’t come back and face a problem he created. Others have talked about the continued bad name this gives Mankato after it had been in the news for numerous deaths and problems associated with excessive drinking.

Now, the argument goes, people are really going to believe Mankato is all about excessive drinking. The mayor was caught driving drunk, a mayor who has been involved in efforts to curb excessive alcohol use. That’s certainly going to be a factor in how the community can measure Brady’s ability to be a leader going forward.

Things are not looking good for the mayor, but we’re obligated by our ethics and our sense of fairness to hear the whole story before passing judgment.



Joe Spear is managing editor of The Free Press. He can be reached

at 344-6382 or atjspear@mankatofreepress.com

Text Only | Photo Reprints
Editorials