An opinion column ran in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel last Sunday and no one know who wrote it. Unbelievable but true. Read this note from the Sentinel’s editorial page editor:
In last Sunday’s Crossroads section, we ran a column (”A return to the rule of law”) about the U.S. Supreme Court and attributed it to former Milwaukee Mayor Frank P. Zeidler.
The problem: He didn’t write it. Another problem. We can’t tell you who did.
We get dozens of opinion submissions every week. When we opt to run one, we do our level-best to ascertain true authorship. We didn’t do enough of that in this case.
Submissions to the editorial pages and Crossroads are routinely verified with phone calls and other means. In this case, the article was submitted by a trustworthy source, and full identification procedures were not strictly observed.
The source was the respected and former Milwaukee Journal editor Richard Leonard, who headed the newspaper from 1967 to 1985. When we talked to him later, he acknowledged sending us the column, doing so in the genuine but mistaken belief that it came from the
former mayor and that he wanted it forwarded to us. This isn’t, however, Leonard’s error. It’s ours. Simply, we should have checked with Zeidler.
We were informed of the error by an e-mail that Zeidler asked his daughter to send us. This was sent late Monday. We’ve been trying to get to the bottom of things since then and held off on a correction until we could give the fullest possible explanation.
We’ll run another correction on Sunday just in case we’ve missed some regular Crossroads readers with this one.
We have tightened procedures and regret the error on a number of levels.
We regret we did not check with Mayor Zeidler before running the piece. We most assuredly should have, no matter how much we trusted our source. I called the mayor to apologize and do so again publicly here. Gracious as ever, he tells us this is unnecessary. We think it is.
We’re sorry, Mr. Mayor.
Mostly, we regret that we exposed our readers to this. To you, our apologies as well.
We will do our best to ensure it doesn’t happen again.
