Last week we had the names of the three Hot Springs businessmen in the wrong order in the caption on a front-page photo. I could explain to you (because I investigated) the innocent path to an embarrassing error, but ultimately it was just a mistake of the kind that required a correction that you can see on Page 5 of our print edition.
Writing corrections is miserable, humiliating work because it is an acknowledgement that we failed in our fundamental goal of getting facts right. But those of us for whom facts are Job One do not have to be dragged into making a correction and doing it as promptly and as prominently as possible. Leaving our audience misinformed is an infinitely more miserable prospect than confessing that we’ve made a sloppy error.
I offer up this mea culpa because I’m about to launch into a rant, and I wouldn’t want anyone to think that I claim perfection. An error is an accident, and most are fender benders; there are people out there whose abuse of the First Amendment is more analogous to a terrorist deliberately driving a vehicle onto a busy sidewalk.
Shortly after I became painfully aware of the photo caption error, I learned that Alex Jones, the purveyor of the InfoWars conspiracy theory website, had finally apologized for participating in the outrageous “Pizzagate” attack on Hillary Clinton and her campaign manager, John Podesta, and a popular Washington pizzeria called Comet Ping Pong.
Protected here in my real news bubble, I had barely heard of InfoWars, much less that Clinton and Podesta were supposedly running a child sex ring out of a pizza joint, until a troubled young father drove 350 miles from North Carolina to investigate for himself — just as an InfoWars video had encouraged him to do. He announced his righteous presence by popping off a round from his assault rifle inside the restaurant.
When the police revealed that a nutjob with a high-powered weapon had cited InfoWars as his inspiration, Jones began to quietly remove all references to Pizzagate from his website and social media, which suggests consciousness of guilt. That was in early December. Only after the owner of Comet Ping Pong, James Alefantis, wrote a letter in late February demanding an apology and retraction did Jones publicly distance himself from the dangerous slander.
The carefully lawyered apology made sure to pound home, over and over, that a lot of other “media outlets” were reporting essentially the same stuff, which, Jones generously allowed, “we now believe was an incorrect narrative.” This, of course, is the “everyone else was doing it” defense that worked so well on your mother.
Jones didn’t say when he arrived at the astonishing conclusion that he had been feeding his trusting audience poisonous swill, but we do understand the timing of his apology. As reporter Paul Farhi pointed out in The Washington Post, Austin-based Jones waited as long as possible to respond to Alefantis’ demand before Texas law would allow the restaurateur to seek punitive damages if he decides to sue Jones.
“This has about the same level of sincerity as the downcast ‘sorry’ muttered by a 6-year-old after kicking his brother while Dad glowers over him with a yardstick in hand,” Post columnist Margaret Sullivan wrote.
I hope Alefantis sues. I would cheer if Jones and InfoWars — who have also trafficked in lies about the slaughter of children at Sandy Hook Elementary, the slaughter of Americans on 9/11, Barack Obama’s citizenship and the government plot that is fluoridated water — faced the same fate as Nick Denton and his odious Gawker site. Jones is already morally bankrupt, and financial bankruptcy would not be too great a price for the harm he has done to James Alefantis and to the gullible minds he has preyed on.
I’m not sure why anyone would waste time on a site whose very name suggests it is at war with information. Clicks are the currency of the internet, and I’m careful where I spend them.
I also avoid cable news, a vast wasteland where every hour must be filled with fresh outrage. I set my DVR to record a CNN series called “The History of Comedy” and somehow managed to get instead Don Lemon and enough disembodied heads for the opening credits of “The Brady Bunch.” I had hoped for a few laughs, but it only took a few minutes before I was ready to cry.
One of the first changes I made when I became editor of Arkansas Business in 1999 was to designate a standard spot for all corrections, and that spot is at the end of the Whispers column specifically because that was and remains the best-read part of our newspaper.
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Gwen Moritz is editor of Arkansas Business. Email her at GMoritz@ABPG.com. |