Of all the media in Sioux Falls, KELO-TV seems to be taking the one-sided view of a story that the Jolene Loetscher campaign is pushing to try to smear her opponent Paul TenHaken in the final days of the Sioux Falls Mayoral run off:
Today, the candidates also discussed a voicemail.
“Paul, you had left me a voicemail where you told me that you had tools in your toolbox that you could choose to use against my campaign,” Loetscher said.
“When I talk about tools in the toolbox, what I mean is negative campaign tools,” TenHaken said.
Loetscher says she saw this “as a threat.” Asked if he left a threatening voice mail with Loetscher, TenHaken replied, “absolutely not.” He said she had brought a negative message against his campaign.
“I called her and said, ‘I wish we wouldn’t do this, I’m going to continue to keeping it positive, I’m not going to use negative campaign tools,’ and that was it,” TenHaken said.
and…
KELOLAND News has asked to hear the voicemail, but the Loetscher campaign says they are not going to release it “because of the investigation.” We asked if the voicemail is part of the hacking investigation, and they say it is.
Also tonight, we asked each of the four other candidates who ran against Loetscher and TenHaken on April 10 if they received a call from TenHaken talking about his tools he could choose to use against their campaign for mayor. We have heard back from both Jim Entenman and Greg Jamison, who both said they had not.
Read that here.
So, KELO is doing a story about a voicemail pushed by their former reporter Jolene Loetscher.. and trying to “investigate” whether her opponent in the Mayor’s race allegedly made calls to all the candidates in the race to discuss “tools he could choose to use against their campaign for mayor.”
Are they actually reporting this as part of their news program? Because it seems to be more of a commercial for their former reporter than objective news with evidence. As opposed to being fair and balanced, it appears they’ve definitely taken a side in the race, and are beating up on TenHaken.
The Sioux Falls Mayor’s runoff election takes place a week from today.