Earlier this week, the Chronicle‘s junior metro/state diarist Lisa Falkenberg ran with a truly unfortunate “gotcha!” that backfired. Badly.
Falkenberg used her column effectively to accuse a U.S. military veteran of lying about his service:
On Twitter, where “Fleckman” has more than 6,600 followers, Fleckenstein identifies himself as a resident of Phoenix, husband, father of two, lover of the beach and “former Marine.”
That last phrase gave me pause, since no Marine I’ve ever met used the word “former” to describe his service in the esteemed military branch. I tried to verify [Peter] Fleckenstein’s service with the Marine Corps’ Washington-based public affairs office and 1st Lt. Joshua Diddams said the office could find no record of a Peter Fleckenstein having served in the Marines.
Perhaps there’s an explanation, such as a name change. I may never know.
As it turns out, there was an explanation, but because Falkenberg and her editors ran with their feelings instead of fact (or, things people “know”), a veteran was smeared unnecessarily.
Here is the “clarification” that the junior metro/state diarist was forced to issue (although it really should be called a correction, and the newspaper really should apologize for smearing a veteran):
On Tuesday, 1st Lt. Joshua Diddams informed me that Fleckenstein had called the Marine office after reading my column and provided a Social Security number, which verifiers used to confirm that he was indeed a Marine. Diddams said there was a mistake in the military record in which Fleckenstein’s last name was misspelled as “Fleckenstien.”
So, here’s the recent scorecard for the Houston Chronicle on basic fact-checking:
When the newspaper should have been skeptical of the credentials of a not-doctor who testified at a town hall in favor of radical healthcare legislation, the Chronicle reporter and editors took the woman at her word instead of definitively vetting the information. They never issued a formal correction.
When presented with a man who identified himself as a Marine on a social networking site, the Chronicle diarist and editors had enough doubts to smear the man without definitively vetting the information. Falkenberg later issued a “clarification, ” rather than a correction.
And, of course, there was the recent Andrew Prieditis experience (although in fairness, he also fooled much better newspapers than the Chronicle).
Are there any grownups overseeing the “journalism” at the Chronicle these days?
UPDATE (08/21/09): David Jennings, the hardest-working citizen-journalist in town, points us to the veteran’s response to Falkenberg’s shoddy journalism.
Dear Diary image by flickr user incurable hippie, used via a Creative Commons license.
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