UPDATED: SacBee corrects their story. (That wasn't so hard now, was it, NYT?!)...
By Brad Friedman on 4/2/2010, 12:03pm PT  

Is it really this hard for anybody in the corporate media --- the folks who actually get paid to do this job --- to get this story right??

From McClatchy/Sacramento Bee's much-linked coverage on yesterday's finding by the CA AG that ACORN workers in California, as seen in James O'Keefe and Andrew Breitbart's "severely edited" pimp hoax videos, "committed no violation of criminal law":

But while McClatchy/SacBee misreports "O'Keefe...claimed he was a pimp," the report [PDF] released by CA AG Jerry Brown yesterday afternoon --- the very one that is being reported on in the article(!) --- notes quite specifically: "He never claimed he was a pimp."

Yeesh. Yet I'm the one who doesn't get paid to do this, so has to beg for donations every month! (Hint.)

The McClatchy/SacBee misreport was filed on their website last night. I notified the paper's editors, along with the article's reporter Jack Chang, about the error via email last night. As well last night, I called the paper, left a polite voice mail for their corrections editor, and then spoke personally to their City Desk editor who kindly thanked me for letting him know about the error. Today, via email, Chang kindly sent a thanks as well. As of 11:51am, however --- and dozens of dozens of misinformed readers having left comments on the article --- no correction has been made to the article on the SacBee's website.

Is it really this hard? Only took two-months for the New York Times to post its partial correction. Let's hope McClatchy/SacBee do the right thing a bit sooner.

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UPDATE 2:40pm: Well, that was much easier. SacBee has now issued a correction which gets the story much closer to the actual facts...

The story now reads:

...And an "Editor's Note" is posted at the bottom, to wit:

Editor's Note: This story has been changed from an earlier version to delete the statement that James O'Keefe III had claimed to be a pimp. On videotape, he had claimed to be a law student seeking advice on how to conduct a prostitution ring. Corrected on April 2, 2010.

We'll call that "close enough" for mainstream media work, and thank both Chang and the Sacramento Bee greatly for timely correcting the error.

Chang also pointed out to me via email that another version of the same article was posted today at the website, and that one was also corrected (prior to the one I noted in the original story above).

Still waiting for the New York Times --- "the paper of record" after all --- to set things right there after more than six months of misinforming the public about the scam that was actually carried about by O'Keefe, Giles, and Breitbart who succeeded in hoaxing both the public and the paper. They have still failed to fully correct the story, apologize to readers and ACORN, explain what happened to allow the repeated (and still continuing) misreports into the paper, what they will do to assure it won't happen again. Moreover, nobody has been held accountable, such as Sr. Editor for Standards Greg Brock or Public Editor Clark Hoyt), who both helped to cover up those errors for months

Now as to the San Francisco Guardian's Chronicle's abominable coverage of the CA AG's report...don't even get me started. It never ends. I have sent reporter Joe Garofoli an email though... .

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