Placed on administrative leave by BTW High School. Very few facts and lots of rumors only so far.
Dan Bitson
- Thread starter Babe the Blue Ox
- Start date
Certainly does not sound good
However , innocent until proven guilty
A lot of people will make up stuff nowadays , so hard to just jump to conclusions
I’ve never seen a field reporter constantly look down at the notes on her phone before. Wow.
If it's breaking news and they didn't have time to prepare a canned story beforehand, they do look at notes to make sure they don't miss anything or misrepresent what's happening.
Me personally , I don’t think things like this should ever make the news before someone is proven guilty , how many innocent lives have been ruined all because someone made something up
I don't know, but assuming that this is about potential criminal conduct at school that may harm students (as opposed to say theft), which I don't know, talking just generally about the above point, the far, far, far more common situation is that the issue is kept secret by the school, the teacher quits before they get fired and then gets hired somewhere else where they can keep doing whatever they did the first time.
Also, you can't exactly keep it quiet until someone is proven guilty since if they are arrested, someone probably will notice they're gone. And usually the perp walk is a good clue. you also can't exactly muzzle the victims if they want to tell their stories.
If the teacher/coach was doing something that hurt students, how would you feel if he stayed on the job and hurt your kid, and then you found out that he was being investigated and had been charged, and maybe arrested and was out on bail, at the time he hurt your kid, but the school didn't tell you? I'd be pretty unhappy to say the least.
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I do get what your saying , I’m all for temporary suspension until it was found out that they were guilty or innocent , you absolutely do have to protect the kids , however , on the flip side , how would you like it if some teenager got mad at you one day for any reason and makes something up just to get the teacher in trouble , they are pretty much ruined at that point when they did nothing wrong . I think there is probably a good middle ground here , I just don’t think involving the news at this point is a good idea. I do agree though that you have to protect the kids obviously, but you shouldn’t destroy someone’s life JUST off of an accusation. However , if it is proven they did something , then bring all of the news stations in and expose them
It's a tough situation. Given the choice, schools will usually try to hide teacher misconduct, it looks terrible, especially with parents having more choice of where to send their kids, and it's a permanent stain on a principal's record. I've done some work in this area, the first thing you tell families is, never report to the school, always go straight to the police. Then if you have uniforms show up, it's hard to hide that something's going on. I'm not sure there's any way to finesse it without giving a get out of jail free card for many bad teachers at the expense of students bc secrecy always benefits the teacher/coach. The good news is that if nothing is found, teachers/coaches can go on with their jobs and it usually blows over pretty quickly, that's the benefit of having students leave in 4 years.
I have no idea what's being investigated with Bitson but in the areas where I've worked, there's a name for all this, passing the trash. Schools let teachers quit before investigations get too far and the teacher then gets a new teaching job and does the same thing at a different school, some teachers go to 3, 4 or more schools doing the same thing at each stop.
Was he arrested? If so there is a booking record and there are literally half a dozen people in any given newsroom whose sole job it is to peruse the TPD arrest records for the day and the OCSN arraignment and court dockets. Those are public records and with today's 24 hr news cycle, if you're not first, your last (Thanks Ricky Bobby) and we know the news likes to make sure their name is out there first on this story whether or not they have full details or not.
It’s KTUL. You’re lucky they have a presence in Tulsa at all with all their staff cuts. It’s the amateur hour over there.
It's also a Sinclair station so I try to not watch any of their news knowing they tend to slant even local stuff.
It was probably a contractor who got a half day gig. Would explain why she read the report from her phone.
Maybe, maybe not. But since the news has become "we had it first" these days, the moment they hear of something they send a reporter and then they start relaying notes about what they can find. No prepared report, no additional supporting sources, no actual fact checking or background, which is why it seems so rushed. I mean news reporting today has become about being first, and who can write the most shocking headline which may or may not accurately reflect the content of the actual article. It's all about clicks...I know this because the news folks, especially the ones adding content for the web have 1 second with the headline to grab your attention, 3 seconds to convince you to click on the article, and another 10 seconds to get you to read the whole thing...and all of this can be (and is) measured on the web and whichever web hosting they're using will provide them with data analytics of the people who browse on the web, who browses on their phone, who is using their mobile app, etc. and then they can sell those stats to their advertisers. The advertisers DO NOT CARE about what the news orgs are putting out in terms of actual content....they literally only care about traffic.
The whole thing stinks. Kinda reminds me of when Shea got a DUI on the Creek Turnpike b/c he was "weaving". They looked at the dash cam and there was no weaving to speak of so it got tossed IIRC.
Having worked in the online media space for a long time, I can tell you that a lot of this is not accurate. Or not representative. You're talking about bottom feeder content providers and bottom feeder advertisers.
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