LA Times to hire first fact-checker sometime soon
Posted by Jerry Scharf
Common Sense and Wonder
The MSM down to it's last bit of credibility and still dropping.
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Bogus Freudenthal quotes end up in L.A. Times
(JEFF GEARINO-Caspar Star-Tribune)
No, Gov. Dave Freudenthal really didn't tell the federal government to go to hell or say that wolves are "federal dogs" in Wyoming, despite what a major national newspaper told its readers Tuesday.
"Oh, boy, that never happened," the governor's press secretary, Lara Azar, said Tuesday afternoon.
What started out as a bogus news release written as an April Fool's joke by Afton outfitter Maury Jones has turned up as fact in the media -- unfortunately, for the second time, according to Azar.
"How long is that April Fool's joke going to keep going?" Jones laughingly said in a phone interview. "I never thought I'd get this kind of reaction. But it's got some legs."
On its front page Tuesday, the Los Angeles Times wrote about continuing resistance to wolves in the greater Yellowstone area. Staff writer Julie Cart quoted from Jones' tongue-in-cheek release titled "Wyoming Governor tells feds to go to Hell."
"In Wyoming, for example, Gov. Dave Freudenthal last April decreed that the (Endangered Species Act) is no longer in force and that the state 'now considers the wolf as a federal dog' unworthy of protection," Cart wrote.
Jones' e-mail included other made-up quotes from Freudenthal in reaction to the federal courts dismissing Wyoming's lawsuit against the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service over the state's wolf management plan. Jones said he sent the e-mail to friends as a joke and has no idea how it ended up becoming "fact."
"Apparently, (the news release) made the e-mail rounds ... but it was (certainly) not generated by this office," Azar stressed.
"We had another paper that ran the whole thing almost (verbatim) ... and we finally got that paper to retract it," Azar said. "We've contacted this reporter and asked them to correct the mistake."
Los Angeles Times deputy metro editor David Lauter called the error unfortunate. "We hate when this kind of thing happens, and we correct it as quickly as we can," he said.
"The reporter saw it on the Internet and had talked to the governor in the past, so she was familiar enough with the way he talks and writes that she thought it sounded authentic and she didn't check, which she should have," Lauter said.
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