Thanks for being a regular reader. You can check out the award-winning Regret the Error book here.
New Brunswick’s Telegraph-Journal continues to atone for an erroneous report from earlier in the summer that set of a scandal in Canada. After apologizing to the prime minister, firing its editor, and suspending its publisher (he’s now back with the paper’s parent company), the paper on Saturday apologized to Monsignor Brian Henneberry for fabricating a quote from him in the offending report:
In its troubled report on the communion service at former governor general Roméo LeBlanc’s funeral mass in July, The Telegraph-Journal said prominently, on the front page, that Monsignor Brian Henneberry, a senior Saint John priest, had “demanded” that Prime Minister Stephen Harper explain what he had done with the communion wafer that he had been given. The newspaper has determined that Monsignor Henneberry said no such thing and believes that the false assertion was wholly the product of improper editorial manipulation.
The newspaper has concluded that the sensational manner in which it presented its interview with Monsignor Henneberry resulted in a serious distortion of his actual remarks which were otherwise competently reported. Monsignor Henneberry’s intent was simply to explain Roman Catholic belief and practice in a factual way after The Telegraph-Journal contacted him. It was not to accuse Prime Minister Harper of wrong-doing or to insinuate wrong-doing.
The Telegraph-Journal regrets this breach of journalistic principles and apologizes sincerely to Monsignor Henneberry for it.
The paper is under new editorial leadership and this latest apology could be a result of some form of internal investigation. Yet we still don’t know who decided to push the story into print, who came up with the allegation that the prime minister had pocketed the now-famous wafer, and who engaged in this “improper editorial manipulation.” (I think they mean fabrication, but I’ll just have to guess.)
So, again, who made this call? Former editor Shawna Richer lost her job over the incident, but did she come up with the false accusations and a fabricated quote? We still don’t know. As admirable as it is for the paper to continue to detail problems with the story, it has yet to explain what happened.
Amazing that it can print two apologies, punish two senior executives, and still keep such important details hidden. I’m not the only one to notice. Just read this bang-on comment on the apology (I added the hyperlinks for background):
The apology is welcome, even at this late date, but it magnifies the seriousness of the affront to journalism which was committed in the reporting of the former governor general’s funeral in July. It was really quite an apalling lapse, when all the particulars are added together. So much so that no concerned reader could be satisfied with anything less than a full account of who did what and why (if known). The euphemism “improper editorial manipulation” is simply frustrating, in part because it implies that there is such a thing as proper editorial “manipulation.”
Any hesitation to name names is understandable, but this did not stop the T-J from “outing,” by name, a student reporter who messed up on a few unimportant facts and another who submitted a translated column from a French-language newspaper as her own work. Needless to say, the “improper editorial manipulation” admitted to in today’s apology was a far more egregious offence. Yet we can only guess who was at fault.
Well said.
