A reporter from NBC3-TV (KNTV) Damian Trujillo, called me at 9 last Tuesday morning, to ask questions about La Voz’s coverage of the DeGuzman case.

Al DeGuzman, a former De Anza student, is in jail, charged with planning a bomb attack on campus a year ago. His trial is scheduled for next month.

At the end of our conversation, I directed Trujillo to our Web site, which contains all of La Voz’s coverage, and invited him to call or email me if he had more questions.

He did get back to me, but not in the way I expected. Shortly after I returned from my scriptwriting class at 12, a La Voz staffer told me “KNTV is here” and wanted to talk to me. I asked, “On the phone?” and she said, “No, they’re here, with the camera.” I walked into the newsroom, and there was Trujillo with a one-man camera crew and a request for an on-the-spot interview.

I gladly agreed. It was not because I wanted to bank my 15 minutes of fame, but because it gave me the opportunity to speak for La Voz, and shed some light on La Voz’s coverage of an event that had stirred up commotion and emotion among the De Anza community.

KNTV stayed on campus for a number of hours, videotaping and interviewing students and De Anza’s president. The story ran that night on the 6 o’clock news, along with four teasers during the 5 o’clock news.

Unfortunately, the light that was shed was distorted.

About DeGuzman, KNTV reported “Now he’s writing letters from his jail cell, and they are being read by the people he’s accused of threatening” and “While [DeGuzman] sits in jail awaiting trial, he’s been writing to the newspaper of the campus he once allegedly targeted.”

That report makes it sound as if DeGuzman and LaVoz have a current and continuing pen-pal relationship.

In fact, DeGuzman wrote only two letters to La Voz. Both were published last October. That was four months ago.

KNTV also reported “His letters have created an uproar among students and faculty.” Their teaser stated, “See how he’s causing problems from his jail cell.”

In fact, there are over 20,000 students and 1,000 staff at De Anza. Out of all those people, La Voz received only seven letters in response to DeGuzman’s printed letters. Five were negative; two were positive.

La Voz printed the four letters in which the correspondent provided contact information and gave permission for printing, which is the La Voz policy.

To obtain additional feedback, La Voz conducted an informal survey in November and included it in its “Back Talk” section.

La Voz asked about a dozen students what they thought about DeGuzman writing to La Voz. About 2/3 gave a negative response; the other third were not upset. I don’t think that constitutes a major uproar, does it?

KNTV said, about me, “She says she’d consider printing more [letters] if DeGuzman keeps writing.”

That implied I would make a decision to print more letters, but that’s not what I told Trujillo. In fact, I told him that the Editorial Board, as a group, decides whether letters addressed to La Voz will be run, and that I couldn’t predict if a letter would be run until we saw a letter and discussed it at an Editorial Board meeting.

When Trujillo visited La Voz, he cordially chatted with me on several topics. We talked about First Amendment Free Speech issues, why La Voz ran the letters, and why La Voz didn’t apologize for printing them. None of that made it into the finished news report, but I wasn’t surprised.

It’s just a few weeks before DeGuzman’s trial begins, the wounds of September 11 haven’t started healing and most of America is confused over a young Marin County man accused of treason.

The media wants perfect sound bites, little pieces to fit into a puzzle of exciting, dramatic stories about violence and terrorism. Tell what sells, that seems to be the bottom line, and Trujillo is just abiding by the rules that guide news media.

It doesn’t bother me that Trujillo chose to take a certain angle on the story.

What bothers me is that KNTV distorted the facts to fit them into a previously devised framework, while at La Voz, we strive to be fair and accurate, and to include as much information as we can in any given story and to render the most complete coverage possible.

What bothers me is that KNTV teaches us that the media has the power to determine what is and what isn’t, while at La Voz, we teach that the media has the power and also the obligation to say as much as possible about what is.

Unfortunately, KNTV has a much larger audience than La Voz, which is why their way of making news and rendering news prevails.

How can we teach the reporters at La Voz to be responsible journalists, if we see the big guys distorting the truth?

In last week’s La Voz, we made a couple of mistakes: we were wrong about the due date of a scholarship application and the date of a poetry reading.

I lost sleep over the errors and posted correction flyers. This week’s La Voz is printing corrections. Those were honest, unintended, embarrassing, and careless errors.

Maybe I should write Trujillo about his errors. I wonder if KNTV would broadcast a correction of their honest, unintended, embarrassing and careless errors.