Schlab,

I am not shooting the messenger, I am questioning the messengers intent of why he only reported a small part of the whole story. I have been lead to believe that a reporter should report the WHOLE story, unbiased with all the information so the mass public can understand the TRUE picture of the situation and form their own opinion.

You are telling me that Mr. Jay Johnson from KIRO basically plagiarized the story that ran in the Skagit Valley Herald, Quote “ Here's the REAL STORY on the KIRO story, and believe me, I know. KIRO got the story from the Skagit Valley Herald, pasted below. The story came from a WDFW press release. They (WDFW) are meeting Saturday morning to talk about severely limiting recreational crab harvest in Puget Sound, because of what THEY (not KIRO!) says is severe over harvest.” End quote

If that is what you as truly saying, what a pi$$ poor job Mr. Johnson did and it aired on one of are leading MAJOR TV news stations, that hurts.

I then ask why Mr. Johnson doesn’t follow publications like the Seattle Times, report Mark Yuasa and the Seattle P.I. , reporter Greg Johnson. In their stories you can see that they did their research and reported BOTH sides or the whole story.
A great example would be the reports they published about the over catch by the Makah. They made sure that their readers would come away with a much better grasp of the WHOLE story good or bad, as any good reporter, of any media type should.

The fact is if you watched KIRO’s story, you would have come away believing that recreational crabbing is at fault for harvesting too many crabs. When that fact is the WDFW have mis-allocated the crab harvest for many years and are unwilling to even consider righting their wrong.

The FACT recreational crabbers are CURRENLTY allowed ONLY, under the direction of the same persons “WDFW”, who supplied the miss-information bulletin and is the only piece of information KIRO chose to use, 3% of the Washington State total harvestable crab allocation. In the Puget Sound crab allocation the recreational crabber receives a whopping 16% of the total.

The FACT is over a 150,000 individual licensed recreational shell fishermen are FORCED to split 16% of the Puget Sound crab harvest, while 181 individual commercially licensed shell fishermen are allowed to share 34% of the Puget Sound crab harvest. Another fact that is obscure to most is that while a recreational crabber can only have ONE license at a time the commercial crabber can have multiple licenses. This explains the fact that there are 250 commercial Puget Sound licenses issued and only 181 owners.

There is even more to this story, much more and it has been out here for a long time. If KIRO had done it’s JOB and researched just a little bit, it would have realized this FACT and report the whole story. I understand why the WDFW did what they did, publishing that the recreational crabber’s are at fault, they where hoping someone would be lazy enough use it without any question. I do not understand why KIRO was the ONLY one who did.

I am asking and will continue to ask KIRO to do another story, only this time they need to report the complete story.

Here are three very easy to reach contacts for Mr. Johnson to contact if he is having trouble finding where to get information regarding this issue.

Washington State PSA President
Steve Sande
SSANDE1@aol.com

RFA Washington State Chairman
Mike Gilchrist
thinker@gamefishin.com

RFA Washington State Vice-Chairman
Clint Muns
Fishhog211@aol.com