Posted on 06/24/2003 11:38:38 PM PDT by JohnHuang2
Call it a Jayson Blair incident in the West.
Like the New York Times but on a smaller scale, the Santa Cruz, Calif., Sentinel has been forced to print three front-page mea culpas after printing a story on government oversight of nonprofits that was chock full of "factual errors."
The piece, published on June 15, "suffered from an inadequate explanation of the financial health of some agencies," explained Editor Tom Honig in a correction story the paper ran Saturday.
"On this page," wrote Honig, "Managing Editor Donald Miller has provided a third list of inaccuracies, for which we apologize not only to the nonprofits named, but also to our readers.
"The reason for our errors and misinformation has to do with one of the oldest tenets of journalism – getting all sides of the story," the editor said.
The story in question covered allegations that the Santa Cruz County government was lax in its oversight of local nonprofit agencies that take government dollars.
Like Jayson Blair and the Times, the reporter who wrote the original story is no longer working for the paper.
"As a result of her involvement in the story and its aftermath, reporter Jeanene Harlick has offered her resignation, and it has been accepted," Honig wrote.
"Our credibility as a newspaper has been damaged because of this story, and our only way of repairing it is to fully disclose how we've been wrong and what we're doing to restore trust."
Miller wrote that the "problems include factual errors and errors of omission that were compounded by this newspaper's failure to contact several of the agencies involved or to include information they supplied giving their responses to the findings."
His third list of errors included eight specific points where the newspaper failed in its reporting and editing.
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