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Mirror did dirty work in leak of AASD email

I have been following with great interest the Mirror article on election day regarding the leak of an email Jesse Ickes sent as a 16-year-old student and the May 26 editorial recommending that AASD should investigate that leak.

While I certainly support an investigation, I feel the Mirror is sadly glossing over their own responsibility in this affair.

While the anonymous person who released the email to candidate John Klingeman was wrong to do so, none of the voters would have been aware of the information without the Mirror article, which clearly tainted the potential voters of Altoona.

If the editors of the Mirror feel it was wrong to leak the email, they can’t then believe they were right to publish an article about it, which caused more harm to Ickes than the initial leak.

I understand that the primary responsibility of the Mirror is to report the news, but journalists do have some discretion regarding what and when they report.

Just as the media chose not to photograph FDR at angles which would show that he was in a wheelchair, the editors of the Mirror could have balanced the potential harm of releasing this possibly illegally obtained information, prior to the primary election, against the public’s right to know.

Basically, I feel the Mirror did the dirty work intended by the anonymous source and candidate Klingeman, and I can’t help but think that the timing of the article was no accident.

I hope that the board of the Altoona Area School District, along with its new superintendent, Tom Otto, is able to determine who leaked student record information and hold said party accountable.

And I also hope in the future the Altoona Mirror won’t participate in leaking information, only to later criticize the source for that leak.

Rob Laubenstein

Altoona

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