Back at the start of the month, the blog voice of Brazosport (Banjo Jones) alerted his readers to the fact that his local newspaper had published a fabricated account of a hard-luck kid by a CPS worker. Since then, Banjo has followed up with several posts on the matter (here, here, and here).
Today, Chronicle metro/state editorialist and gossip columnist Rick Casey picked up on the story.
Unlike Banjo, Casey praised the publisher of The Facts and its readers:
The other part of what I like about the story is how publisher Cornwell and the Facts responded, and the reaction of the newspapers’ readers.
Cornwell, who was at an ethics seminar in Oklahoma when he received a call from reporter Lauck, immediately stopped the series upon learning that the story about John had been fiction. The paper ran a detailed article about the matter.
Cornwell also met with the appropriate officials to check on how the money raised was being spent. He found nothing improper.
But the readers did. Many were outraged that the Facts had stopped the series.
“What we heard from them was that they didn’t care whether the stories were true or false,” he said.
Cornwell should have been more diligent about checking the stories and he should have started running the stories again after instituting proper safeguards. And if readers told Cornwell that it doesn’t matter if stories in the newspaper are true or false, they are wrong (although we can’t imagine many readers putting it that way).
The conclusion to Casey’s column of olds is just bizarre:
I can’t help but wonder what would have happened had Francis Pharcellus Church written America’s most famous editorial in 2005 instead of 1892.
Would he have been flogged by chest-beating bloggers for not telling Virginia who Santa really was?
Huh?
Since Casey’s column of olds doesn’t mention any bloggers but credits KHOU-11’s Dan Lauck for getting to the bottom of the story, I can’t make sense of that non sequitur.
UPDATE (12-19-2005): Banjo comments on Casey’s column.
