1) John Doe shot Jane Doe.
2) Police say John Doe shot Jane Doe.

These are two very different sentences, which is the topic of Your View: attribution. It is the "he says, she says" of journalism that can separate a news story from an editorial. Without attributing facts in a story to someone, those facts can appear to be a journalist's opinion.

One viewer had a problem with a script where we didn't attribute a statement about malpractice lawsuits.

The script read: "When asked about limiting medical malpractice lawsuits, a major way to bring down health care costs, the president said he wouldn't support that idea."

Elizabeth wrote us to say "This morning a female newscaster reported on an Obama speech regarding health care. She made one derogatory statement to the effect that Obama said little of substance, but then she continued making a declaratory statement that limiting malpractice claims would lower health care costs, and Obama said he wouldn't support that. My main problem is with her absolute declaration that limiting malpractice claims in some way would lower health care costs. That is her opinion, not a statement."

KOMU News Director Stacey Woelfel said, "so it wasn't the anchors' opinion or even the producers who wrote it. What we had there was somebody, a source in the story, their opinion about what the story was about, and the producer didn't properly attribute that or source it to that person, and we really should do that every time it's opinion and not provable fact."

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