Monday, January 15, 2007
SOURCES NOT CHECKED
Following columnist Terry Lane’s Jesse Macbeth debacle last year, Sunday Age editor Peter Fray claimed:
He has been mortified by the week’s events and humiliated in public. I am confident he will check and double-check and triple-check his sources in the future. He has learned his lesson, as has this paper.
Well, maybe not. Last Sunday, Lane wrote:
Here’s an amusing example of the divide between good and bad America. A recent press release from the organisation Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility draws attention to the fact that rangers in the Grand Canyon National Park are forbidden to answer visitors’ questions about the age of the canyon because the truth will upset Bush’s fundamentalist supporters.
A “fact”, eh? Commenters quickly turned up refutations of this; see here, here, and here. Consider that a “triple-checking”, Terry.