Setting the record straight
Last week, while I was on vacation, Jerry Bledsoe posted the following comment to a thread on the Dudley/A&T riots of May 1969. At question was our decision to correct the wording in a July 27 Counterpoint column by Steve Flynn.
Allen,
Steve Flynn raises a matter that you need to address. He says that the words Donnie Stowe [who rebutted Flynn's column the following week] disputes in the counterpoint above are not the words that he wrote. Is this true?
I can understand that somebody might want to correct what Steve says he wrote because it is patently false. But if what he says is true, and somebody at the paper changed what he wrote, that person changed it to something that was equally false.
One obvious question that arises from this is whether readers can trust that what they are reading actually was written by the person whose name it bears.
Is it a violation of the newspaper's ethical standards to change a passage to make it say something completely different without notifying the writer or making the reader aware of the change?
Readers deserve an explanation.
It is our practice to correct errors of fact in op-ed columns, if we are aware of them.
In the Counterpoint column in question, we felt the writer confused the facts about the riots, noting in the original draft that a "female A&T student" had been killed, and not indicating that the riots started at Dudley and moved to A&T. (I was there for part of this; I was a student at Lincoln Junior High, across the street from Dudley. Tear gas wafted into our halls and class was dismissed early.)
So we checked our archives and corrected it. Here is what Mr. Flynn wrote:
I learned so much from the statement of Dr. Claude Barnes, A&T political scientist, telling of his boyhood growing up in one of Greensboro's poor but proud Jim Crow housing projects. That neighborhood was Morningside, the very community where the tragic events of 1979 took place. It was moving to hear his recounting of the Dudley High School revolt of 1969, when he and other Dudley teenagers were stormed by armed national guardsman lobbing tear gas and firing bullets (one A&T female student was killed). As Professor Barnes sees it, the events of 1969 and 1979 came as no surprise to many in the black community."
Here is how we edited it:
It was moving to hear his recounting of the Dudley High School revolt of 1969, which later spilled onto the A&T campus. Armed National Guardsmen stormed Scott Hall, lobbing tear gas and firing bullets (one A&T student was killed and two others were wounded). As Barnes sees it, the events of 1969 and 1979 came as no surprise to many in the black community.
So far as we know, we did not edit an error into the column. The casualty count for the 1969 Dudley-A&T riots came from this May 2, 2004, story in our news archives:
"... On May 21, a disputed student-government election at nearby Dudley High School sparked a riot that carried over to A&T. That night, Greensboro police were shot at, reportedly from snipers on the roof of Scott and other A&T buildings.
"National Guard troops arrived on the second day, which was marked by more rock-throwing and the overturning of a car. Late that afternoon, Mack and a couple of thousand other A&T students gathered near Brown Hall, then a cafeteria.
"The rally broke up just after dark. As students tried to leave campus, they heard shooting. So they ran for the sturdy brick fortress of Scott Hall. ...
"The students crouched on the floor. Guardsmen opened fire. ...
"Twenty minutes of gunfire was followed by tear gas, which drifted into the room through the broken windows. ...
"In those three days, one A&T student, Scott Hall resident Willie Grimes, was killed. Two other students were wounded, including one as he stood inside a Scott Hall window. Six police officers and soldiers were wounded.
"Scott Hall was a shambles. Most of the dorm-room doors had been kicked in or shot through. The building reeked of tear gas.
" Neither Grimes' killer nor the snipers was ever found."
Where we might have erred is not providing more context in the parenthetical statement. We will run a clarification.
Those numbers of killed and wounded students were based on the entire three days of rioting, not merely the part involving Scott Hall.
As for our policy on editing op-eds, letters and Counterpoints, we do contact the writers if major changes are needed or major issues arise. We did not consider this one of those cases.
I have spoken to Mr. Flynn on the telephone and he appears to undersand that. He was, however, amazed at the wave of response to his piece.
For Truth and Reconciliation-related columns, I told him, that's par for the course.
Comments (5)
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Allen, thanks for your clarification. Debate may continue on this topic, but this is another good use of a blog for discussion.
Posted on August 11, 2005 9:51 AM
Allen,
Thanks for addressing this, as well as for the clarification you intend to publish.
I think that a reasonable person reading, “Armed National Guardsmen stormed Scott Hall, lobbing tear gas and firing bullets (one A&T student was killed and two others were wounded)” would think that a student was killed by guardsmen storming the dormitory. That is false.
I was involved in covering this and if memory serves, guardsmen fired on Scott Hall in response to sniper fire from the building. The student killed, Willie Grimes, was shot hours later and not in Scott Hall, the shooter unknown. The sweep of Scott Hall by guardsmen didn’t take place until some 30 hours after Grimes was shot. I don’t believe that resulted in injuries, although doors were kicked in and locks were shot off.
If your intention in inserting “(One A&T student was killed and two others were wounded)” was to indicate the casualty rate from the three days of rioting, shouldn’t you also have included the four police officers who were ambushed and wounded, one seriously, as well as the innocent passersby who were pulled from their vehicles and beaten by rioters?
Posted on August 11, 2005 12:26 PM
If we were writing our own piece on the riots, yes, Jerry (as John Newsom did in the article I cited). But Steve Flynn was writing this piece. We were simply trying to correct a factual reference.
Posted on August 11, 2005 12:40 PM
I understand Allen's explanation for the "correction", and that seems okay to me. However, I also understand Jerry's point that if you are going to correct wrongly asserted facts, you should correct all of them. Perhaps an editors note at the bottom of the column pointing out the factual mistakes by the writer and also pointing out that the National Guard were not responsible for the death would have been appropriate. I think you both have vaild points.
Posted on August 11, 2005 7:09 PM
Don't blame Steve Flynn.
In effect, the N&R rewrote Barnes's speech, it didn't rewrite Steve Flynn's letter (providing Flynn relayed it correctly.)
The writer was merely relaying what Barnes had said in a speech, a speech which evidently lacked little of the "truth" sought by the T&R committee.
A more entertaining exercise might be for the N&R to publish the text of Claude Barnes's speech and analyze that for truthfulness.
Posted on August 11, 2005 11:15 PM