Baton Rouge, Louisiana newspaper The Advocate recently apologized for wrongly attributing quotes to a local high school football coach.
But the kicker is that The Advocate doesn’t know who its reporter got the quotes from, Regret the Error’s Craig Silverman wrote. According to the newspaper’s correction, “The reporter who wrote the story thought he was interviewing coach Price after the game. Because the interview subject was not Price, the reporter is unsure whom he spoke with.”
This apology reminds iMediaEthics of two of the Daily Beast’s Howard Kurtz’s corrections from this year. In January, Kurtz corrected his Nov. 27 article on Rep. Darrell Issa six weeks after he was told he misattributed an interview to Issa. Kurtz said he thought he was interviewing the California representative, but he was really interviewing his spokesperson. And last month, the Daily Beast added an editor’s note retracting quotes mis-attributed to Nancy Pelosi. Kurtz reportedly got the quotes from a fellow reporter’s notes, “misread” them and then published the quotes.