Our words matter, too

Maybe you’ve noticed that supporters of District Court Judge William Estelle have embarked on a saturation bombing campaign of our Opinion page lately.

Nearly all their criticism has been leveled at the Alaska Judicial Council, which recommended against retaining Estelle based on inaccurate pay affidavits that he signed.

It’s an honest mistake, the letter writers say, one that should not cost Judge Estelle his job.

Here at the Frontiersman, we know a few things about honest mistakes. We write for a living, but we don’t write fiction. Our work entails the communication of facts. People tell us things and we endeavor to put them in writing accurately and completely.

It doesn’t always play out that way.

And it didn’t work every time we wrote about Estelle. One piece of criticism that has been leveled at us in this retention debate surrounds a story we wrote that used the word “dishonest” to describe Estelle’s affidavits.

The judge’s defenders fought back against that description, saying that the correct word to describe the affidavits would have been “inaccurate.”

As journalists, we hear this sort of accusation often when we make mistakes. We know from our experience with mistakes that there is a noteworthy distinction between inaccurate and dishonest.

Politicians say we’re deliberately trying to torpedo their campaign when all we did was inadvertently tweak the wording of something they said.

Police officers accuse us of wrecking their cases when all we did was accidentally swap one name for another.

We get it. And we’re sorry that we did the same thing to Judge Estelle.

The word dishonest can (and, in this case, did) paint with a broader brush than intended by suggesting that the person taking the action is wholly dishonest. We heard from family members of Judge Estelle who say that’s how they felt reading the story, like our reporting portrayed their loved one as dishonest. That was never our intent.

So we’re asking readers and Judge Estelle to grant us the opportunity to make the distinction: we made an honest mistake when we selected dishonest as a synonym for inaccurate in an August story.

We are fairly buried in election related letters right now.

Many are from our neighbors writing in support of Judge Estelle. We will continue to print as many of these letters as we can before the election. We have a backlog of about 50 letters now, however.

At frontiersman.com we’ve removed the word “dishonest” and replaced it with “inaccurate” in that Aug. 12, 2014, story in an effort to remedy this perception.

Further, there is nothing in our reporting that suggests Judge Estelle should not be retained.

We like that when he learned that he made an error, he turned himself in, and then conducted his own research to figure out if there were other cases involved.

Thank you to the many community members who have written to us in support of Judge Estelle. That so many of his neighbors and longtime friends have contacted us to show support is telling.

And thank you to Judge Estelle for your years of service to our community. We look forward to working with you for many years to come.