Wednesday, March 19, 2008

The C-J "Clarifies" McConnell Misquote

Some newspapers, when they make a mistake, issue a correction or a retraction. When the Courier-Journal needed to clean up the mess it made yesterday -- attributing a quote to Republican Senate Leader Mitch McConnell that actually came from a rival -- it issued a "clarification."

According to today's C-J, the story it ran yesterday "was unclear in its attribution of a statement by Dan Coleman, manger of Democrat Michael Cassaro's campaign." To the contrary, the story was very clear -- just factually incorrect. We need a dictionary to translate C-J speak: a "clarification" is a correction; "unclear" means flat out wrong.

The "clarification," incidentally, does not mention McConnell or in any way say to whom the quote was incorrectly attributed. Nor was McConnell's the only missing name. The "Human [sic] Festival playwright" (see post below) didn't even get a "clarification."

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