Yesterday, I made a serious blunder. One of our regulars had brought my attention to the “fact” that another regular, Dave Crockett, had been in Liberia during the Ebola outbreak.
As I was plowing through a pile of email from the time I was at the beach last week, I passed this along. It was one of five similar posts, all based on emails that interested me and that I thought might interest you.
The trouble is, the fact wasn’t a fact.
Some time AFTER posting it (which is backwards timing), I started wondering about the Crockett post, and did some inconclusive Googling. I wasn’t able to confirm what I was assuming to be true — that the David Crockett in the story was our David Crockett. Finally, I did what I should have done first, which is check with our own Dave Crockett himself. His reply:
Yoiks, Brad! Hell no, that wasn’t me! There is a David Crockett who is a TV reporter out in Washington state and a psychologist by the same name in St. Louis, but I am neither! The wildest trip I’ve made recently was Lake Lure, NC and all I came down with was a hangover one morning. But thanks for asking…
So. I apologize to him, to the other David Crockett, and to all of you for my momentary carelessness. This was a mistake I would never have made in print. But when you’re plowing through tons of email, most of it mind-numbing, it’s just too easy to go, “Oh, THIS one is interesting!” Then copy, paste and share it with the world before moving on to the next email. And not stop to THINK until you’re done with all the hundreds of items in your In box.
What I left out was the actual journalism. And I’m very sorry, and embarrassed, about that. You know that item I posted (based on another email) about everybody needing an editor? Well, this is a far better example of the principle.
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I could try to make myself feel better by saying that in nine years of blogging, this is the first time I’ve published something so patently false.
But it doesn’t. Make me feel better, that is.
“this is the first time I’ve published something so patently false.”
What about when you suggested John McCain would be a better President than Obama?
Ha-ha.
Taking down the previous, erroneous post meant unpublishing Dave’s comments elaborating on the subject, which I now share here:
By the way, one of the factors contributing to my mistake was my vague memory I had of OUR Dave having mentioned living in Greenville…. For what that’s worth, which isn’t much…
Hey, I forgive your error. At least it wasn’t a flier at the Post Office you were mislead by… 😉
misLED by. Now I need an editor…
Eh, no big deal.
Aaargh! That’s the version of Peter Guillam from the film version of “Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy.” For some reason the filmmakers completely changed the character. And I’m not just referring to the fact that they arbitrarily took an unambiguously heterosexual character (Guillam is about as close as le Carre comes to creating a James Bondish, skirt-chasing action hero) and made him gay, which was the more obvious change. The more fundamental change was his relationship to our hero, George Smiley. In the book, Guillam was Watson to Smiley’s Holmes, a protege and sidekick of many years’ standing. In the film, he hardly knows Smiley at the beginning, and they have to learn to trust each other during the plot. Weird. I see no good excuse for that, especially since it is essential to the plot that Peter be one of the few people Smiley can trust without question…
The Guillam character in the TV version with Alec Guinness was true to the book….