On Monday, I took the Chronicle to task for an editorial that made claims about the association of one James Guckert (Jeff Gannon) with “a number of sexually oriented Web sites.” At the time that editorial was written, Washington Post media critic Howard Kurtz had written that domain names had been registered, but the sites had never been hosted. The Chronicle reprinted that Howard Kurtz column. Thus, I criticized the Chronicle editorial board for not having its facts straight despite having posted those facts elsewhere.
That criticism was valid based on knowledge available at the time (and available to a Chron reader). However, Howard Kurtz corrects his earlier column with the following update today:
The problem for Gannon, whose real name is James Dale Guckert, is that he told The Washington Post and CNN’s Wolf Blitzer last week that he never launched the Web sites whose provocative names he had registered, such as hotmilitarystud.com. But a Web designer in California said yesterday that he had designed a gay escort site for Gannon and had posted naked pictures of Gannon at the client’s request.
Further details of the “gay escort site” are available here.
As the story has developed, it appears that the Chronicle editorialists were actually right in their assertion, at least about one website — just not at the time they made them and not according to “facts” available to their readers at the time.
We do thank the “big media” journalist who called this development to our attention (said journalist asked that we not share his/her missive). Further, we’d like to suggest this clarification as the sort of clarification/correction that bloggers (and other savvy news consumers) find useful, not corrections that obscure the original mistake or updates that refuse to acknowledge obvious error.
