WINOL: Week 6

It was a good week this week as I encountered WINOL's first complaint of the semester. The complaint followed a live studio debate, which focused around tuition fees and budget cuts. The format consisted of a presenter posing questions to three studio guests (two of which were left and one right of the political spectrum). From the offset we were rather dubious about appearing bias due to us only having one Conservative guest, so we payed close attention so as not to appear as we were attacking him in any way. Oddly it was not this individual who filed the complaint.

The individual had complained that he had been unfairly treated as he was misrepresented by the way the final edit was put together; his complaint wasn't that there was heavy editing, but that it had been edited in a way which he felt misrepresented him.

All involved, and I saw this was the case, did everything in their power so as not to cause controversy and remain impartial and fair, however, due to inexperience, we made a fault and duly and graciously accepted this. In response we wrote an apology to the studio guest, and offered him a chance to reappear as a guest. In addition, we are also going to publish an open letter of apology on the website to acknowledge our mistakes and present the fact that we have nothing at all to hide in coming forward to receive criticism.

My duty was to offer the guest our condolences and offer him a chance to appear as a guest again (an offer to which I am yet to receive a reply to). Also, Veronica and I worked together to write the apology letter. I strongly believe that everyone involved worked quickly and efficiently to amend the problem (i.e. I took the video down from YouTube), and appease the studio guest.

Although the aforementioned was the highlight of my week, other tasks were undertaken by myself which included: reviewing the bulletin, publishing the stats, thanking the IT staff for the improvement on our network, distributing the bulletin running orders in the newsroom, and helping with filming.