That’s pretty much what the executive editors of the Wilmington Star-News and The Fayetteville Observer said about not running the Kerry “military people are stupid” story last week. The Star-News‘ Executive Editor Tim Griggs uses a baseball analogy:
Many of you noticed coverage of the story wasn’t in this newspaper. And
you let us have it – via phone calls and e-mails – with appropriate and
justified agitation.I apologize for that. We shouldn’t have missed it.
In baseball, a good center fielder makes a lot of plays.
Most
of us don’t think much about them – the thousands of routine fly balls
or the few spectacular diving catches – until a player stumbles and
drops the ball. Then we all notice.
The Observer‘s executive editor, Brian Tolley said:
Perhaps the biggest national story of the day, the comments (or botched
joke, as he would call it) by John Kerry regarding the intelligence of
our troops, did not appear in our paper Wednesday. Although we
recovered the next day, we simply whiffed on the story.
I worked in newsrooms for most of 25 years and, yes, sometimes copy editors make mistakes. But this is a mistake that could only have been made 1) in a complete vacuum from what was happening in the world on that particular day, or 2) intentionally. I don’t know which would be worse for the newspaper industry.
