From the Questionable Department

"I think the best decision is for the employees to follow the Contra Costa Newspapers model," said John Armstrong, president and publisher of Bay Area News Group-East Bay, in a Friday, Oct. 12, 2007, article by Contra Costa Times reporter George Avalos. http://www.contracostatimes.com/search/ci_7157804Armstrong was referring to why he thought East Bay news workers would be better off remaining nonunion since our mothership, MediaNews, withdrew its recognition of the Media Guild as the bargaining agent for six of the company's Bay Area newspapers."That model," he continued, "relies on a strong relationship, a direct relationship, between the staff membes and their supervising editors."Putting my natural cynicism and snarky remarks aside, Armstrong doesn't bother to mention why it would better to not have a union or what right the company had to pull the union rug out from under members without asking us what we wanted.But his biggest fallacy (defined as a deceptive, misleading, or false notion, belief, etc.) is that the model assumes those editors we would be working so closely with are competent.What if they're not, and who gets to decide?