Sometimes, everyone, even the best reporter and editor, has an off day. Brian Harrington, a clinical professor of public health at the University of Toledo, was strongly irritated by a story The Blade ran on Aug. 7, 2009, about the swine influenza A H1N1 vaccine.
‘The statement, ‘The mandatory vaccine would next be available to students,’ is attributed to Larry Vasko, deputy health commissioner for [the] Toledo-Lucas County Health Department.’
‘This is not a mandatory vaccine, and Larry did not describe it as such,’ Mr. Harrington said. He was correct, and The Blade promptly ran a correction that said the vaccine was not mandatory.
Unfortunately, the correction failed to acknowledge that Mr. Vasko did not describe it as a mandatory vaccine.
Mr. Harrington then complained a second time, accusing the newspaper of ‘misleading its readers’ and ‘unethical journalism.’
So I asked for more details. The editors determined that the attribution happened as a result of an editing error.
So the newspaper ran a second correction. On this story, the newspaper clearly had an off day. More than one, in fact.
But Mr. Harrington was off-base when he accused The Blade of ‘unethical journalism.’
If the newspaper was unethical, the editors wouldn’t have run any correction at all.
And they certainly wouldn’t hire me to criticize them in print in their own newspaper.
Two callers who didn’t leave their names were angry over a story The Blade ran on Aug. 12, 2009, under the headline ‘Judge orders Toledoan freed from prison.’
The story was about David Wilton, a 38-year-old father of three who had spent the last year and a half in the Madison Correctional Institution after being convicted on child pornography charges.
He could have been made to spend another three years behind bars, but the judge ordered him freed.
The callers weren’t disputing the facts of the story, and they didn’t have a problem with its tone.
They were, however, upset because the judge’s name who ordered the release was left out of the story.
‘We should know what judges do when election time comes,’ a woman said. ‘Why is The Blade covering up for this judge?
Well, the answer is that there was no cover-up just a clumsy error. The reporter involved is one of the city desk’s best, but inadvertently forgot to include the judge’s name.
Normally that would be caught by an editor, but ‘we overlooked it too there’s no excuse,’ said Kim Bates, The Blade’s city editor.
For the record, the judge who ordered the man’s release is Lucas County Common Pleas Judge Stacy Cook.
By the way, she didn’t give Wilton an unconditional release. He was placed on probation for five years, can have no contact with any minor children, including his own, and no access to computers or the Internet.
