Talk:Terry Moran

General Edit

Film-- Has it been verified that the actor in the film is the same Terry Moran? I cannot tell, so I will leave it in but it should be checked as it seems odd.

Family-- Wikipedia's guidelines for biographies of living persons states: "Take particular care when considering whether inclusion of the names of private, living individuals who are not directly involved in an article's topic adds significant value. The presumption in favor of the privacy of family members of articles' subjects and other loosely involved persons without independent notability is correspondingly stronger. In all cases where the redaction of names is considered, discuss the issue on the article's talk page".

The names and occupations of family members are not directly involved in this article's topic, and they do not have independent notability. This seems to be an unnecessary step into the privacy of all involved. The section should be removed.

Controversy-- (general) This article has no writing about his career besides two "controversies", one of which is based on speculation by a biased source. For the balance issue alone, the controversy section should be removed, but particularly because it is an admitted speculation from a biased source. Discussion of the second controversy is below.

Controversy-- (Duke) I was not surprised to read something with such an obvious bias against the individual, as this happens frequently on Wikipedia. I was, however, surprised to see the Mr. Ball whose online petition is promoted in the article has been the driving force behind including the Duke "controversy" in the article (as seen on the history, talk and discussion pages). This is irresponsible, and blatantly biased (if the author of the section has a petition attempting to get someone fired over the issue the section covers--that is bias). I was also surprised to see that this issue which had been settled was brought up again, a long time after the incident had passed. I agree with the previous argument against keeping it in the article, particularly now when it is an even more minor issue that it was at the time.

Wikipedia's policy on "coatrack" or "attack articles" include controversial topics involving living persons. The example given is particularly applicable here: "Wikipedia policy specifically prohibits articles whose primary purpose is to disparage a particular person or topic. Articles about a particular person or topic should not primarily consist of criticisms of that person or topic. For example: John Doe works as a journalist. He has given over 30 years of long and faithful service to his newspaper. However, one day, he made the terrible mistake of nearly reporting an unchecked fact that came within a whisker of ruining an innocent person's life. Because he did this, he is an evil person. Here is some more information about this incident… (and so on, and so forth)."

That example from Wikipedia pretty much sums up my objection to the "Controversy" section, particularly because almost nothing about his career besides controversy has been covered. Jessiecat08 (talk) 13:23, 21 November 2008 (UTC)

Duke Lacrosse blog post

I again removed this section which, in my opinion, has no place in this article (at least for the time being). If Moran's blog post becomes a major news story--it certainly is not right now--and highly controversial it's possible it would warrant inclusion. Jball65 points out that the information about Moran's blog post is factual--i.e. he did make a post criticizing the Duke lacrosse players--which is true, however the fact that a piece of information is factually accurate does not at all mean it belongs in an encyclopedia article. There are any number of facts about Moran which are not included here, and the fact that some people have disapproved of one of his blog posts does not seem notable enough to me--particularly since what has been posted here so far has strong POV problems.

The section I removed (which even after edits was still badly written and formatted) said that "The site where this article had been posted became indundated [sic] with negative responses to Mr. Moran's article." I looked and there were negative comments following Moran's post, but also comments agreeing with Moran, and other comments somewhere in between. In other words, Moran made a blog post and it created a bit of a stir. This is hardly fodder for an encyclopedia article.

I suggest that editors who are adamant about including this at least hold off for a few days. If it develops into a truly controversial story perhaps it should be put back in. If it basically just dies down and no one remembers his post in a month, I can't see any reason why it should be here.--Bigtimepeace | talk | contribs 04:43, 16 April 2007 (UTC)

Jball65 reinstated the Duke stuff and wrote a reply to what I wrote above which can be read at User talk:Jball65 (that stuff should just be moved over to this page) Below is my reply.

I'm not going to revert this again because I don't want to even approach violating 3RR. For Jball65, you should know that under this rule editors cannot revert one page more than three times in a 24 hour period. You have already reverted this page three times. The reason for this rule is to prevent edit wars. When you say "I will continue to place the Duke Lacrosse players portion of this article back up each time it is taken down" it suggests you will not abide by this policy. It also suggests you are not willing to work with other editors and listen to their opinions. You have only made a few edits on Wikipedia but I hope in the future you will be more open to other editors ideas about content, rather than insisting that your way is the right way.

Someone else will hopefully look at this, but in my opinion the section as written clearly violates Wikipedia's very strict rules about Neutral Point of View (see WP:NPOV). The entire section is quite negative toward Moran. It makes it seem as if everyone responded negatively to his post, when in fact some folks clearly agreed with him. Also you do not quote Moran in his own words, or fully explain his arguments in his blog post. As the criticism (little as their is) has only just developed, there has been no time for Moran to respond to his critics. Thus the paragraph reads like a hit piece on Moran. Also Moran is notable in this encyclopedia because he is a well-known journalist, yet the way the article is now this tiny, largely unknown controversy is given as much play as his entire journalistic career. It is completely disproportionate.

Despite Jball65's claim on his talk page, there are not "hundreds" of articles about this Moran blog post on the web. Hundreds of blog posts maybe, but a google news search on the words Terry Moran and Duke only turned up 15 articles. Most came from conservative news sites with a strong bias against Moran.

In short--this is not a big story yet and perhaps it never will be. Articles on well-known people would be really terrible if they included every minor controversy associated with that person. We try to decide what is notable, and just because you view this as notable and some bloggers have discussed it does not mean it belongs here.

Again, the best thing to do is to take this out for now and if the story becomes important in the next few days it's quite easy to put it back. With developing stories whose significance is unclear, there is no rush to put them in wikipedia (unless one has an axe to grind). So I think we should keep it out and see what happens with the story. Does this sound reasonable Jball65? If someone else wants to take this down right now I'm all for that, or I might do this in a day or two.

As for the paragraph itself, "ibid" appears in the middle which it should not, there is a link in the middle which there should not be, "site" is spelled "sight," and the extremely odd sentence "Many of the blog responses posted have made inevitable references ["inevitable?" why?] to shock jock Don Imus's statements regarding the Rutgers Womens Basketball Team" with no explanation as to what that means.--Bigtimepeace | talk | contribs 05:59, 16 April 2007 (UTC)

"He graduated from Lawrence University in 1982 and worked as a correspondent and anchor for Court TV, where he was recognized for his expertise in covering the Lyle and Erik Menendez murder trial in Los Angeles, California, in 1993."

What does it even mean to say he showed "expertise" in covering the murder trial? And how was this "expertise" "recognized?" Just curious. The person who has written this article appears to be a fan. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 72.177.25.139 (talk) 05:08, 27 November 2007 (UTC)

Controversy section

I removed the whole bit with this edit. We try to avoid those on BLPs, almost the entire thing was unsourced, and a significant portion of it was original research. The most recent addition relates to the tweet about Obama's comment about Kanye West (sourced to this) but that is: A) Extremely trivial, and not appropriate for a bio; B) Quite pov as written (as was much of the section); C) Not even necessarily about Terry Moran, since it's not clear whether he even posted or rather some staffer back at ABC did without checking first. If it becomes a huge media brouhaha and Moran is at the center of it then discussing it here might be appropriate, but we're a ways from that right now.

Please don't simply re-add this section—the sourcing was terrible among other problems and the burden is on those who want the material included to source it properly and keep it NPOV, especially on a biography of a living person. --Bigtimepeace | talk | contribs 08:04, 15 September 2009 (UTC)

I don't see what is POV about a current event that actually happened and is sourced. I was right in the middle of reading the portion you removed by the way. Dumaka (talk) 17:12, 15 September 2009 (UTC)

The POV part relates to breaching journalistic ethics, which is not in the source and is highly POV. But point C in my comment above is the key thing, which I elaborated on at your talk page (you might want to read that—leaving a talk page message for other users is by no means considered "rude" as you suggested on my talk page and there was no need to get upset about that). There are several problems here, but for starters we have the distinct possibility that another ABC staffer, not Moran, posted the tweet, which you need to respond to. We have very strict rules about biographies of living people and do not add every trivial detail reported in the press, particularly when it's not even clear if the person in question was directly involved. --Bigtimepeace | talk | contribs 17:35, 15 September 2009 (UTC)

I was right in the middle of saying something but now it is all gone due to the fact that we both wrote something at the same time. Dumaka (talk) 17:38, 15 September 2009 (UTC)

Anyway, I didn't re-add the controversial section, I simply put the facts back. We have a source that says it was him, however. If it turns out that it wasn't him then the page will be updated accordingly.Dumaka (talk) 17:41, 15 September 2009 (UTC)

Just FYI, if you get "edit conflicted" when typing something you can usually just back up your browser and retrieve the comment. I did not know you were going to come to the talk page, because you edited first and then commented here. I was typing my comment on your talk page at the same time you were typing your comment here and just wanted to make sure you would discuss it. That kind of thing happens all the time during editorial disagreements.

I tried that before and I still lost everything. Dumaka (talk) 18:07, 15 September 2009 (UTC)

You are not really responding directly to my points, one of which is that the "facts" are not at all clear. The source we have (which consists of a couple of sentences and a statement from ABC, i.e. it's basically a blog post) conflicts with itself. It is extremely likely that Moran, like many other prominent people, does not actually do his own tweeting. The ABC statement says "ABC News employees [note the plural] prematurely tweeted a portion of those remarks that turned out to be from an off-the-record portion of the interview. This was done before our editorial process had been completed." In other words, it's entirely possible if not likely that it was some staffer responsible for the tweet feed that put up the raw information being relayed by Moran without editorial oversight. See what I'm saying? Otherwise why the reference to "employees" if this was Moran tweeting on his Blackberry or something? Perhaps Moran did it himself, but if not we are making an accusation against him which is not true, and at this point the facts are unclear.

Also this is a tiny Wikipedia article, and while Moran is a very prominent journalist, about one quarter of our article on him relates to one "tweet" which has been mildly covered and which he might not even have tweeted. This is a significant problem of undue weight.

You need to make a better case for including this (and again bear in mind that BLP is extremely strict about including questionable material), but for now I'm removing the bit about journalistic ethics since that is not remotely supported by the source and is a very, very serious accusation against a working journalist. --Bigtimepeace | talk | contribs 18:01, 15 September 2009 (UTC)

If you feel Politico and many other news agencies are wrong in their report of this incident and that it should not be included in this article then by all means change it. Dumaka (talk) 18:10, 15 September 2009 (UTC)

They may be wrong or they may not be, I have no idea, it's just that it seems very unclear to me. Spur of the moment journalism is frequently sloppy, especially when it's a gossipy item like this. For example this MSNBC story misquotes the ABC press release, saying "Moran 'prematurely tweeted ... before our editorial process had been completed...'" when the press release refers to "employees" but not to Moran by name. Because of the inherent sloppiness and misinformation often found in off-the-cuff reporting like this, I always think it's best to hold off on putting information into an article (since we're an encyclopedia and not google news). I will say though, that this is somewhat embarrassing for Moran no matter who posted the tweet, since he is responsible for his own twitter feed obviously. I just want to make sure we have the facts straight before we even consider putting this in his bio, which in any case seems like a bad idea to me as I've said since this article is so light on content about his career.

Anyhow, are you saying you are okay with removing this, or that it's okay to alter but not remove it? Your last comment was a bit unclear.

Finally, try not to intersperse one of your comments with another editors' as you did above—it's quite confusing when others look back on it so it's good to not break up another editor's comment, not that it's a huge deal or anything. --Bigtimepeace | talk | contribs 19:14, 15 September 2009 (UTC)

Gay?

Is he gay?