On Friday, Kristen Mack turned in her first column as the Chronicle‘s new local-politics columnist, a spot unfilled since John Williams left the newspaper in June.
It was an inauspicious start, inasmuch as it included this snippet at the very end:
State Rep. Talmadge Heflin says he’s in tune with his district. On a recent television show Heflin said: “I have been very much in touch with the district. It covers part of Katy school district, part of Alief, part of HISD, part of Spring Branch and part of Stafford. I know the district, I know the schools, I know the needs.”
Apparently he doesn’t know it as well as he thinks. Turns out no part of the Spring Branch School District is in State House District 149, according to Heflin’s Web site.
Leaving aside the fact that Mack’s last sentence is actually a fragment (there’s no subject), it’s a mean “gotcha” type assertion that must have been embarrassing to the newspaper since, as Rob Booth pointed out, it’s not true.
The Chronicle ran the following correction today:
State House District 149 represented by Talmadge Heflin, R-Houston, includes a non-residential portion of the Spring Branch Independent School District. A story on page B2 in Friday’s Chronicle said incorrectly that none of the district is in SBISD.
Booth takes issue with the correction, noting that it’s also “factually incorrect.”
Will the newspaper now issue a clarification of its correction? Stay tuned.
Mack’s column, incidentally, will appear every Friday.
