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The Daily Tar Heel

Letter: N&O disputes claim of declined interview

TO THE EDITOR:

Your article about the “Unverified” documentary reported The (Raleigh) News & Observer’s Dan Kane either declined to be interviewed or was not allowed to do so. Neither is true.

An N&O team of Dan Kane (reporter), Steve Riley (investigations editor) and I agreed to talk with Bradley Bethel and his team on the record for as long as they wished.

We only asked that Bethel agree to answer our questions on the record (once we had answered his questions). We wanted to question him about his blog posts and tweets. We also wanted to ask him questions about the documentary, including his funding and methods.

We did not agree to be interviewed on camera. We wanted to have a deep conversation, including being able to make reference to files, documents and spreadsheets.

Bethel declined our offer.

John Drescher

Executive editor

The (Raleigh) News & Observer

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