St. Louis: Woman pulled a fast one; reporters, editors didn't do their jobs

Too bad she didn't say her name was "Heywood Jablome."

 

bingo

 

Yeah, I keep waiting for all those stories about Josh Hamilton's resurrection to blow up in the writers' faces ...

 

That's funny.

Reminds me of a time when our Features Editor ran a stand alone photo in the night on the town section of the tab we run. Guy gave his name as Jack Mehoff. It ran and then we got letters and calls.

The best part was our editor at the time writing an apology column, where he used humor about the whole situation, discussing how he did phone directory searches for Jack Mehoffs nationwide and found plenty of them - some of which lived on some very interesting street names.

 

Because the story was too good to check, that's why.

 

They were too busy blogging to fact-check.

 

Just curious, but how far do go to confirm somebody's identity? When I was a reporter, I never asked a source for a driver's license. The story cited above says they did, and she provided them with a fake. Do you ask your sources for ID, and do you then check to see if it's real?

 

Or Jack Mehoffer.

 

Because they were too busy scouring the country in their search for a SE.

 

I asked in a nice way for the driver's license of a woman who was the cover story this week for my community news magazine. She said she was born the same day - in fact, two hours before - a tornado ripped through our town 72 years ago this Saturday and killed 222 people. Because of the stories she's heard about the tornado and how her family witnessed it, she said even the slightest rumbling of thunder or crack of lightning makes her want to take shelter.

I wanted to make sure she was telling the truth. She was more than happy to show her license, not only to show her birthdate (and it did say 04-05-1936), but also to brag about how much weight she's lost since the license photo was taken (about 30 pounds). She also showed me her birth certificate.

My accompanying photog snapped a shot of the license and it ran with the story. Her license number was edited out of the pic. I also did a sidebar on her sister and brother-in-law, who were in the Georgia Dome watching the Mississippi State-Alabama SEC tournament game when the tornado hit downtown Atlanta.

 

This might sound like putting a band-aid on a much bigger problem, but over the years -- when tearjerking background isn't the entire story, but mentioned in some measure in the story -- I've gotten a lot more picky about attribution to facts, like, "Jones says he was orphaned when he was 4" instead of just stating as fact.

That way, you shift the onus of truth a little bit.

Wouldn't have worked in this case, obviously.