You know as a newspaper you’re in trouble when, faced with libel allegations, you publish a correction of a correction.
And you know the stakes and public visibility are high when the corrections deal with the Sacramento Kings, the city’s professional basketball team whose coverage by the local media – including The Bee – is at times obsessive.
The Bee points to itself as the top provider of Kings’ news, with good reason and self-interest.
The team’s popularity helps drive readership and circulation, the paper’s research shows, and its online following, which stretches overseas, has made the team a consistent Top 10 hit on sacbee.com, often overshadowing state news and politics.
The paper pours more resources – reporters, columnists, photographers and news space – into covering the Kings than any other team, by far.
So when sportswriter Joe Davidson wrote a story on Saturday Oct. 22 about new Kings’ guard Bonzi Wells returning to Portland – where he had played for parts of six turbulent seasons – for an exhibition game, it was interesting and relevant.
The guard, who the Kings obtained from Memphis in an off-season trade, had a star-crossed tenure in Portland, where at one point he was suspended for two games for cursing the team’s coach. He described his experience in Davidson’s story, headlined “Wells doesn’t have fond memories of Portland.”
But there was a major problem.
A sports department copy editor carelessly changed a few crucial words without telling Davidson, making Wells responsible for “marijuana possession,” “domestic abuse” and “locker-room tussles,” which was false and which the original story never implied.
By Saturday night the phones were ringing. Wells’ agent, an upset William A. Phillips, was calling and demanding a correction. The next day, he talked to sports editor Bill Bradley and to Davidson. The editor and reporter acknowledged the mistake and promised an immediate correction.
Bradley said he tried to correct the paper’s online story by removing and rewording the libelous reference. He was told he couldn’t because of the paper’s policy to append a correction at the top of the story and leave the offending text alone.
A correction, cobbled together by two news editors in sports and news, ran in Monday’s paper. It turned out to be wrong, leaving the impression the transgressions were committed by the entire Portland team, rather than some members of the team.
Phillips fired off a formal retraction letter to the paper and he sent out a press release and a statement from Wells saying he had been wrongly accused. The Kings placed the latter two prominently on their Web site.
The story was instant fodder for sports talk radio and Sacramento television sportscasts. Davidson received scores of critical e-mails and phone messages, and The Bee was excoriated on radio for sloppiness, carelessness and irresponsibility.
The tempest enveloped Joyce Terhaar, the managing editor, and Tom Negrete, the assistant managing editor for sports and business.
At 3 p.m. Monday, the paper broke with its online corrections policy and substituted a corrected version of the story for the offending one on sacbee.com, leaving an ambiguous sentence – “This story was edited after publication to correct an inaccuracy” – at the top.
“If you have something online that libels someone, you have to change it right away,” Terhaar explained. “The corrections policy has to reflect the medium … TV and radio correct as they go along.”
Because of this incident, she said, the paper will likely change its online corrections policy, trying for a balance between the need to immediately fix major errors while also keeping an accurate historical record, warts and all, for the archives.
That makes sense to me, though the paper is reacting to an embarrassing mistake rather than having a policy already in place that anticipated the fundamental differences between online’s speed and immediacy versus print’s slowness and rigidity. This is a case of breaking precedent for the right reason – and that’s fairness to someone wronged by the paper’s mistakes.
On Tuesday, the paper printed a new correction, clearly absolving Wells and the Portland team as a whole.
And the paper then went one extraordinary step further.
Bradley drove to the Kings’ practice facility Tuesday afternoon to hand-deliver a letter of apology to Wells. The letter described The Bee’s print and online corrections and explained the mistake was not Davidson’s.
Bradley waited 10 feet away during the NBA-mandated media interview session as Wells soaked his feet in ice water and said he would talk after he was done with a cell phone interview. Wells, said Bradley, talked on the phone for 18 minutes and then walked back into the locker-room, without ever speaking to Bradley or taking the letter.
The Kings’ public relations people told Bradley that Wells was too “furious” to talk and wanted to avoid saying something he might later regret.
Bradley gave a copy of the letter to the PR people. He will wait a week before trying to give Wells the letter again.
Bradley said he has never delivered a letter of apology, but that the Wells’ story was different because of “extenuating circumstances.”
Terhaar said the apology is similar to the paper’s practice of its attorney sending a letter to someone who was the subject of a serious mistake and explaining that corrections have been made to set the record straight.
The difference in this case, she said, is that the hand-delivered apology is “more personal” and attempts to repair Davidson’s “reporter relationships” with Wells and the team on the eve of the new season.
