Envision A Cuttingroom-Floor Scenario

Eileen Riddle of Hayden Lake caught only the last half of ABC’s “20/20” on March 10, not enough to hear the full story of a report linking heart attack risk to hypertension drugs known as calcium channel blockers.

“I thought, I’ll catch it in the morning,” she said. But Saturday’s Spokesman-Review contained nothing about the study.

On Thursday, when a front page article by S-R medical writer Jeanette White reported on area doctors’ reaction to the news item, Riddle called to ask why we hadn’t printed the original story.

Why? The most maddening of reasons.

“It slipped through the cracks,” said News Editor Kevin Graman.

In fact, editors had talked at their Friday evening news budget meeting about putting the story on page 1. Somehow, in the struggle to fit the day’s news into a tight allotment of newsprint (like slipping a 10-D foot into a 7-A shoe) the channel blocker story was overlooked.

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