Posted on 04/16/2005 10:53:00 PM PDT by SmithL
The death of Chico State pledge Matthew Carrington from drinking too much water in a hazing incident reverberated throughout the Bay Area and was the source of intense media coverage.
On March 29, the Los Angeles Times published a long story by reporter Eric Slater about the impact of the 21-year-old Pleasant Hill college student's death on the campus and Chico.
To be blunt, Slater's story was a mess.
That's not one opinion. Many people agree, from Chico State President Paul Zingg to the management of the Los Angeles Times.
Even Slater thinks so. After the Times printed a correction two days later, he wrote a rambling public e-mail in which he called the Chico piece "the worst story in my 19-year journalism career."
But the point here is not that a reporter did a bad job on a story. It goes deeper than that, and at a time when public trust in the news media has never been lower, it goes to the heart of what we do and our relationship with our readers.
Certainly Slater's story was not an advertisement for a paper that would win two Pulitzer Prizes the next week. Slater missed the population of Chico by 36,000, said a student at a nearby college died when he was only hospitalized, quoted Zingg without mentioning that he'd lifted the quote from a local newspaper rather than speak to Zingg himself, and said Chico State was well known for basketball when he surely meant baseball.
Those are just the errors cited in the correction, but now it may be getting worse.
"It is certainly beginning to look like much of it, if not all of it, is a fabrication," Zingg said Friday.
Serious questions are now being raised. Some people are asking whether Slater even went...
(Excerpt) Read more at sfgate.com ...
Another Mitch Albom. Facts aren't good enough; it's the story that counts and deadlines justify anything.
Wasn't that the claim of that book-writing fraud?
A story to remember the next time a MSM whiner clucks about blogs and forums.
"Wasn't that the claim of that book-writing fraud?"
Yes. Plus that old stand-by, "Everybody does it."
But the one guy actually did die, no? It seems that is getting lost in the story-about-the-story.
I'd think the editors would have a little more control of their writers for one thing. Nobody seems to even know if this guy went to the school or not, he was SOMEWHERE at that time.
Paul Greeene, meet Greg Packer, the NYT's , "Man on the street".
"She posed nude for Playboy, but won't give her name to the L.A. Times?'' Dobin asked incredulously.
Now that was funny.
Of course, a "review" must be performed before hands are quietly slapped (if at all) six months down the line.
LOL...its a tough job and somebody has to do it
And of all threads to get NAILED on, (looks at thread title, pinches self) ...
But I blame it on my assistant, Mary Mapes. I'll FIRE her for that. LOL
Just the other day the Boston Globe announced they wouldn't be printing any more stories by a certain woman reporter because it was discovered that her piece was written before the actual event took place. They're already suffering from falling subscription levels.
Mary, again ??? LOL
What did Bitch do?
"What did Bitch do?"
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DETROIT — (AP) Best-selling author Mitch Albom apologized Thursday to readers of the Detroit Free Press for incorrectly reporting that two former Michigan State players were at the Spartans’ Final Four loss to North Carolina. He said he wrote the column before the game took place.
Albom said he based the column on what former Michigan State players Mateen Cleaves and Jason Richardson told him they planned to do. He said he wrote the column in the past tense, as if the events already had happened, because the story had to be filed Friday afternoon — a day before the game — but would appear Sunday.
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View Forum Post
Topic: Letters Sent to Romenesko
Date/Time: 4/7/2005 2:17:50 PM
Title: Freep needs to do more than issue an apology
Posted By: Jim Romenesko
From ERIC DEGGANS, columnist/editorial writer, [Poynter's] St. Petersburg Times: So..let's see. A columnist writes a piece on Friday about an event that is to happen Saturday. Because the column will run Sunday, he writes it as if he saw it happen or reported the facts after they happened, both of which are baldfaced lies.
Here is a line from that column: "They sat in the stands, in their MSU clothing, and rooted on their alma mater." How would Albom know on Friday what these guys were planning to wear Saturday?
More importantly, what editor in their right mind would let a columnist write like this? Albom tries to pretend in an "apology" column that all he did was misstate that these guys would be at the game. "It wasn't thorough journalism," he writes.
The truth is, Albom did far more than that.
Here's another quote: "And both made it a point to fly in from wherever they were in their professional schedule just to sit together Saturday. Richardson, who earns millions, flew by private plane. Cleaves, who's on his fourth team in five years, bought a ticket and flew commercial."
Now we see that Albom didn't just lie about the men being there and what they wore, he also cited details about their travel arrangements that turned out not to be true because they never showed up.
Here's the last graph on that column: "You looked around the stands Saturday, and you realized the truth: that you never know how right they are until you're the one saying it."
When Albom wrote that graph he couldn't look around the stands, because the game hadn't happened yet. And in its correction, the Free Press admits that Albom's column ran in a section printed BEFORE THE GAME.
That means anyone who read the column in that section and knew the Free Press' publication schedule, knew he couldn't have witnessed the events reported, or unearthed them after the fact. Certainly, every editor at the newspaper had to know Albom's column was bogus. But they only admitted it when the players failed to attend the game and shattered their charade.
Joe Hass is right when he notes others would be fired for what Albom did. And given the cicumstances, Albom isn't the only journalist at the Free Press who lied to readers to make this column happen.
To save the newspaper's credibility, there needs to be more punishment for Albom and his enablers than an embarassing correction and mea culpa column. Whether or not the Free Press has the stones to take action and salvage its reputation is the only question remaining.
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