Fixed
Saint from the Fraters ran a correction for a mistake they ran. According to a Coleman email to Jim Geraghty:
My "stepmother", Deborah Howell, worked at the Minneapolis Star when I worked at the Minneapolis Tribune. I never worked for the Minneapolis Star. The papers were completely separate until their merger in 1982.
Error found, error corrected:
The statement appearing on Fraters Libertas about Coleman's employment at the "Minneapolis Star" was a mistake - therefore, arguably, so was a further elaboration about his career being in "lockstep coordination with that of his stepmother." It's incorrect and we apologize for the error. A correction will appear in that archived post.
Boom. There it is.
It took a matter of few minutes for the Fraters to correct their error.
Compare that with the chinese fire drill that Powerline is going through to get the Strib to correct Coleman's string of defamatory "errors" last week.
When will the reading public learn from the Strib that Coleman "erred" in saying Powerline was on the Claremont payroll or got money for its opinion? That he "erred" in reporting that Alabama had rejected a constitutional amendment to remove segregationist language as a slur on Republicans, when in fact it was protest against a back-door tax hike?
When will the Strib apologize for foisting a columnist on the world whose idea of media criticism is giggly sex-organ jokes?
The Fraters show how the blogosphere, with its instant revision and immediate accountability, is supposed to work. The Strib, in the Coleman saga, shows everything that is wrong with the mainstream media; accountable to nobody, answerable to standards that have meaning in the yeshiva-like academic setting of the elite editorial board but, oddly, have little to do with getting the truth to the public.
Posted by Mitch at
January 6, 2005 07:24 AM
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Of course, the papers were owned by the same company, and they operated out of the same building, using the same presses.
I'm sure they were separate in the way K-Mart and Sears will be separate--different editorial staffs and management. But to argue the Star and the Tribune were as to one another as the Strib and the Pioneer Press is disingenuous at best.
I'm a liberal, and I'm leery of blog triumphalism--but Coleman isn't doing himself any favors here. Again.
The guy can turn a phrase. That and $.59 will get you a taco.
Posted by: Jeff Fecke at January 6, 2005 08:58 AMMitch,
Leaving aside your continued insistence that removing the Jim Crow era language in Alabama's constitution denying the right to a public education constitutes a "back door tax hike," can I ask you to explain what you meant by criticizing the "mainstream media" by characterizing it as a "yeshiva-like academic setting"?
A yeshiva, for those who don't know, being a religious Jewish educational entity where people are trained to become rabbis and typical study includes debating the meaning of the various sources of Jewish law.
Of course, you also called the media "elite," so it must be bad.
Posted by: Slash at January 6, 2005 09:55 AM/jc
Slash,
My image of a Yeshiva is a place where people debate the arcana and details of Jewish scripture, as they apply to life and the universe, to a depth of niggling, obsessive detail that would probably even shut *your* nerve endings down, Slash.
How that applies to the "elite editorial board": Did you read Powerline's piece on the rationalizations the Strib's editorial board went through to avoid retracting Nick Coleman's defamatory statements? Niggling detail.
As to the Alabama bit - yes, you had best leave it aside.
Posted by: mitch at January 6, 2005 10:11 AM