Earlier this week, I put up a long post at From The Bleachers, my football blog, regarding a column by Florida Today columnist Peter Kerasotis ([email protected]). You can read the details here, but in brief, I spotted a flat-out lie on Kerasotis’s part and pointed out clear photographic evidence to that effect.
Since then, something in the neighborhood of 5,000 people have read my post. Kerasotis himself replied with a beyond-lame excuse (which I appended to my original post), and has since stopped responding to emails asking for a retraction. Florida Today executive editor Terry Eberle ([email protected]) and sports editor Ralph Routon ([email protected]) have also failed to respond to requests for a retraction.
I’m bringing the subject over here to VodkaPundit because it’s no longer about football. It’s about integrity and responsiveness in the mainstream media. As I said in an email to Routon, as a columnist, Kerasotis is certainly entitled to his opinions about the football game, but he isn’t entitled to his own facts. Kerasotis alleged in print that a dangerous incident occurred after the game, when no such thing ever happened.
Three days after Kerasotis’s fiction was clearly pointed out to him and his editors, no retraction, correction, or apology has run, and all of the above are refusing to respond to readers. Why not? Since when are people who work for newspapers suddenly higher beings who don’t have to live up to basic standards of truth?
Stonewalling is awful in a politician, but we expect politicians to lie to us. So what does it say about the MSM when a newspaper does the same thing?
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