Ottawa Citizen columnist David Warren has had to backtrack on claims made in a couple of recent columns. From February 20:
A retraction. In my Sunday column, I wrote in passing about the kind of Shariah practised in Iran, “where a little boy caught stealing gets an arm amputated under the wheel of a truck.” Many, many, horrible things happen under Shariah in Iran, but that event, widely disseminated on the Internet with photos, wasn’t one of them. The photos were of a (disagreeable) magic act in that country, and the wrong captioning was exposed on the Little Green Footballs website, just after they first appeared, three years ago. Should have checked. Link
January 23:
Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa. Normally the pundit who has committed a factual error leaves the correction to the shortest possible postscript at the end of his next column. But I’ve decided to lead with mine today. Not because the mistake was so ghastly - though it was pretty ghastly - but because it was instructive.
We’ve been discussing free speech and free press, lately, in the encroaching darkness of “political correction.” In Saturday’s column, I touched on the efforts made by various faculty and students at the university called La Sapienza in Rome, to prevent Pope Benedict from delivering an address at the opening of term. I said he was intending to discuss the famous trial of Galileo. I got this little nugget from mainstream media, who gathered it from the anti-papal propaganda. The pope had cancelled his appearance, to avoid a pointless confrontation with people I compared to howler monkeys (see below). But he was publishing the speech so anyone with a genuinely open mind could read it.
Imagine my surprise, when the speech came out on the Internet. It did not even mention Galileo. I’d been busily defending the pope, in advance, for something he wasn’t even going to say.
…But mea culpa. Had only I checked with the Vatican, on what the pope’s speech was going to be about, I could have avoided the trap of believing what I’d heard from those “howler monkeys.” The lesson, which I thought I’d long since learned, is never take anything at face value, no matter how many times it is repeated in the media. Link
Thanks, Carol!
