Okay, I gotta say I’m sorry.
The very thing I have complained about others doing and I’ve been found guilty. I posted something that I didn’t verify, didn’t check the facts, and I was wrong.
Nikki Preede, the anchor/reporter in Birmingham who is hosting a nightly re-cap of the Richard Scrushy trial has never worked for Scrushy’s PR Department at HealthSouth.
I picked up that bit of information from some source and repeated it in this blog without checking the facts. Nikki e-mailed me tonight and very politely told me I was wrong. Nikki did work for a law firm that represented Scrushy on a matter totally separate from the latest HealthSouth legal troubles but did not work for Scrushy or the guy from the Wonder Years.
Sorry Nikki.
I screwed up on this small stage of the blogsphere which, I might add, is seen by several people each and every day. One of those is my mom.
The thing is, while I’m just a simple blogger I still felt a need to report something that I had heard reported somewhere else, without checking the information. It happens in newsrooms from time to time too. How many times have I had a producer hand me an article out of the paper with 30 minutes until newstime and say “rewrite this article for the 3rd block”?
There was no time to check the facts of the story. There was no time to do anything except change a few words around, format it for a tv news story and run to the set. It’s wrong and most are never caught but it happens.
In fact, it happened last week and (let me attribute this) according to the Charlotte Observer, it cost a producer their job. This tv station news producer lifted a story out of the newspaper, apparently cut and pasted two sentences into a news script verbatim.
I did it, and I apologize. Thanks Nikki.