As I read
this piece, it struck me as odd because it didn't pass the smell test for actual journalism. It reads more like a glossy overview garnered from similar glossy overviews on the Internet, i.e., a lot of unsubstantiated Channel 19 "facts," which far too often is passed off as journalism these days.
Then you get down to the reader comments where his reporting gets slammed, and it's the manner in which he defends his reporting that is most glaring. Instead of supporting his statements with factual details of the case, he points readers to, of all places, the SMS scoring page, which The Trucker's Report (and many others) has long criticized as being a grossly misleading method of determining a carrier's safety record, since the CSA scores are inherently unfair and misleading and not at all an accurate depiction of the carrier.
So, instead of confirming the facts he wrote in the article, by bothering to look at the actual court records and stuff, he
reasoned that the stuff he was parroting from other articles must be true, because, hey, look at their CSA and SMS numbers. That's a major logical fallacy fail, and one that any journalist never should have gotten near.
Then you get down to comments posted by DND's attorney, and the author suddenly stops responding to comments, and instead washes his hands of it and walks away from the article with an "Update" to the original article by dismissing the attorney's comments as cherry picking semantics. The problem with that is, the cherry picked comments by the attorney were cherry picked to address directly, and refute, the statements made in the article, and none of them were semantical. The attorney's version of events match the common sense and rule of law of the judge's decision far more than the author's article does. So, it looks like the author of the piece, likely under pressure to crank out content for the site, got caught with his bad journalism pants down.
Last year the FMCSA gave notice that they were going to use their iron fisted authority with more authority, and would be shutting more carriers down. In their official statement about this shutdown order, not only do they have a lengthy quote from Senator Dick Durbin (IL), which was done in order to say, "Hey, look! We done good!", but they also tout their record so far in 2014 of carrier shutdowns to prove it. Turns out that in 2011 DND was audited by the FMCSA and was told to correct several things, which they did, and received a Satisfactory rating. They were looked at again in August of last year, and at the time of the accident they had a Satisfactory rating. Then, suddenly, after the accident the FMCSA says the company has a long history of unsatisfactory willful disregard for safety. Even during this investigation, DND has complied with every request of the FMCSA, including implementing electronic logs, and the FMCSA shut 'em down, anyway. Looks more like the FMCSA is trying to cover their own political behind more than anything else.
