“The putrid smell of rotting fish wafts through the air at West Wind Estates in East Naples, and it’s made all the worse by the relentless sun beating down upon the decaying corpses. Still, sun is better than rain since most of the homes in the community have roof damage, if they even have a roof at all,” dramatized Lisa Conley, with the Naples Daily News.
“This type of “Selective Target Reporting” has a recent Harvard study saying 65% of Americans don’t trust the media. Gallup’s similar poll saidonly 32% trust the media now,” said factory-built homeowner, the Reverend Donald Tye, Jr. to MHProNews, adding the word, “Sad.”
Conley’s ‘reporting’ bias/ignorance is reflected by a photo and video in her same report. Her story shows smiling home owners – just days after the storm – who are living in the same community. See that photo, below. Perhaps Conley needs to go to the ‘school’ that RC Williams reported on? — linked here.
“West Wind Estates, a neighborhood composed of trailers [sic] and manufactured homes, is just north of Marco Island, where Hurricane Irma made landfall on Sept. 10. The community, which is exclusively for residents 55 and older, took a sharp blow from Irma and is now finding it difficult to piece it back together,” Conley wrote in her story.
“Publishing hand-picked information can be worse for the impression it makes on manufactured homes and our industry than stating entirely false information,” said Brad Lovin, of North Carolina Manufactured Housing Association, previously told MHProNews in a similarly biased report.
The smiling faces of residents belie the dramatized headline that the Naples Daily News ran, which said the community was ‘unlivable.’ Where there dead fish, debris and power outages elsewhere, not just in this senior land-lease community? Is Conley’s column and that of the editor reflecting bigotry? Bias?
Conley’s column also stated that, “The roofs of many houses are now nothing more than twisted hunks of metal laying on the side of the road, and like many neighborhoods in Collier and Lee counties, the homes in West Wind are still without power.”
The Society for Professional Journalists Code of Ethics begins as follows, “Journalists should: – Take responsibility for the accuracy of their work. Verify information before releasing it.” Clearly, the use of the term ‘trailer’ is not accurate, nor appropriate. To learn more, click the image above or see the video interview ‘Walk Down Memory Lane,’ at this link here.
The Naples Daily News writer need only look at the stills and video of her own story to know that much of that twisted metal was in fact carports and other add-ons, not the roof of manufactured homes at all.
“Residents clean up West Wind Estates in East Naples on Sept. 16, 2017. The senior community was hit by Hurricane Irma on Sept. 10, 2017,” reads the caption of a photo with Conley’s name by it.
From this camera angle, the metal roofed home nearest the workers seems to be intact. Further, the metal held by the one resident appears to be part of a add-on, not a home’s roof. Still from video, Most of these roofs appear okay or intact. Debris from car ports and other add-ons are visible in this video. To learn more about a similarly flawed mainstream media report, click here, or click the graphic below. Collage by MHProNews.com.
That damage occurred is not in question. Damage and destruction occurred to conventional housing too, by the billions of dollars. While photos alone are not conclusive, some of those metal roofs could have been retrofits, and some of the twisted metal was from car ports, as a close look at their own video reflects.
To see a prior report on the facts about hurricanes in Florida, click here. ## (News, “fisking” = analysis.)
(Editor’s Note: The two previous comments from manufactured housing industry veteran’s below need to be considered as MHI prepares its ‘campaign,’ because without responding vigorously to such stories, the sheer volume of negative news could counteract whatever they try to do.)
To see that report, click the graphic above. “In view of the history on this thing, it is logical to be skeptical of the entire process,” says a dubious MHI award-winner, Mary Lavin, who expressed his doubts about Richard “Dick” Jennison’s announcement, potential and timetable. Lavin refers to the mainstream media’s reporting as the industry’s ‘other image campaign. Until MHI addresses the underlying issues, Lavin says such efforts are a waste of time. The Manufactured Housing Institute (MHI) Logo is there property, and is used here under fair use guidelines. Collage credit, MHProNews.
(Image credits are as shown above, and when provided by third parties, are shared under fair use guidelines.)
Submitted by Soheyla Kovach to the Daily Business News for MHProNews.com.
