Saturday, August 10, 2019

Now, That's a Correction

If you don't subscribe to The Washington Post and have used up your free articles for this month, this is unfortunately behind their paywall [hey, that rowboat of the newspaper's owner pictured below, the S.S. Virtue Signal, doesn't pay for itself].  However, let me make this short; certainly shorter than the correction itself.

A free-lancer, who often writes about how food criticism is a bastion of "white privilege" [Told ya!], wrote an article a few weeks ago about black families in the south attempting to hold onto their generational farmland.

It turns out the article was accepted without anyone actually checking its details.  You know, like an editor.  I thought they still had those at newspapers.

So, The Post wrote a correction, and it's a doozy. In fact, it's almost 600 words long.
A previous version of this article contained many errors and omitted context and allegations important to understanding two families stories,” the correction reads. Among them: Wilson’s article misspelled the first name of a source’s grandfather, credited him with the wrong number of children with his second wife, misstated the number of acres sold in a partition sale, misquoted a source, “omitted key details that affect understanding of ownership of the land....
It was a touching story, but in the era formed by Stephen Glass and Jayson Blair, not to mention The Post's own Janet Cooke, one would expect them to be a tad more cautious as to what goes to print, even if it's just to check not fabrications, but accuracy.