Friday, November 18, 2011

Roth or Ross, Only the MPress Knows

Last night I was standing in the foyer at a Buttonwood Tree concert when a friend and neighbor showed me a text she had just received from an old friend and Wesleyan grad, John Hickenlooper, who is now the governor of Colorado.

 It said something like:  "Who revoked my diploma?"

It began yesterday when Wesleyan Green founder Ross Levin sent me a note about a Wesleyan event to support the Occupy movement's Day of Action.  Wesleyan students were going to "revoke" Hickenlooper's diploma because, as governor, he had broken up the Occupy Denver protests.

The Middletown Press and Patch covered the protest, and the Press reported that Wesleyan President Michael Roth had joined the protest to revoke the diploma.  The only problem was that it wasn't Michael Roth, it was a student playing the part of Roth.

So the Denver Post picked up the story and reported that Roth himself had revoked the diploma.  Oops.

The Post has since revised its story, but as of this writing (6:15 a.m.) it was still mistakenly headlined on the Middletown Press site.  Time to tell the reporters that if they don't know the players, they need to get a scorecard.

More on the story at Wesleying.

UPDATE: By 7:30 a.m., the MPress headline had been revised.
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3 comments:

  1. AnonymousNovember 18, 2011 at 9:25 AM

    So the 1% is protesting against the 1%?

    ReplyDelete
  2. The Middletown PressNovember 18, 2011 at 2:14 PM

    Clarification: The Middletown Press did not actually cover the protest. We first found out about it when we received a press release from Ross Levin Thursday night.

    The press release was posted on middletownpress.com later Thursday night (10:22 p.m.), and we made the mistake of not specifying that this was a press release or verifying the facts of the release. This lead to a very incorrect headline. The headline was changed about 30 minutes later to reflect that the degree was revoked symbolically.

    Around 3 a.m., we received a Fact Check via our website that Michael Roth had not been in attendance at the event, but that a student was portraying Roth during the ceremony on campus. We corrected this in the story, and the headline was changed around 7:45 a.m. Friday to reflect these changes.

    You can read more on our corrections blog here: http://middletownpressfactcheck.blogspot.com/2011/11/correction-michael-roth-not-present.html

    Viktoria Sundqvist
    Editor

    ReplyDelete
  3. BNovember 19, 2011 at 1:40 PM

    How about those lovable goofballs at the MPress!

    ReplyDelete

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