More On the Adventures of the Recovering Fabulist

Lemme explain.  No, there is too much.  Lemme sum up.

If you're new to the whole Editor & Publisher scandal involving editor Greg Mitchell, get caught up here.  I'l wait...

Done?  Swell.  Today, Hot Air notes that E&P has inadequately re-adjusted Mitchell's confession piece about his fake story about Niagara Falls, to reflect the correct year and Mitchell's correct age at the time of the transgression, which had been misreported, both in the original 2003 confessional and in the various altered versions of that article that appeared last week in the wake of much blog ado about Mitchell's journalistic irregularities (and their contrast with his tirade against "freewheeling" and "politically-driven" bloggers, intent to wage a "propaganda war" against the media).

However, today's doc-job conceding the inaccuracy of the timing of the Niagara Falls story-within-a-story continues to get it wrong.  See for yourself.

CORRECTION, August 27, 2006: Several readers of the 2003 story below have informed us that the water flowing over Niagara Falls was turned off in June 1969, not in 1967, as the article below stated. We have corrected or deleted that date and Mitchell’s age where they appeared in this column. Mitchell worked at the Gazette in the summers of 1968 and 1969 before graduating from college in 1970. The incident recounted below occurred in his second summer at the paper, not in the first, as the original had it.

This still ain't right.  It sounds reasonable that Mitchell interned in both 1968 and 1969, between sophomore/junior and junior/senior years.  But the original version of the article didn't make the (perhaps more understandable, plausibly unintentional) mistake of confusing which of his summer internships involved the Niagara Falls trip.  Mitchell had placed it yet an entire year earlier, in 1967, when he was 19, presumably before he ever worked at the paper.

In magnitude, it's a smaller error that thus remains uncorrected, but if E&P has taken enough heat they feel they now need to address this via a correction, one would think they'd be careful enough to see to it they're finally getting their facts straight.  Clearly they are not.  The internally inconsistent correction as described above serves to minimize the significance of the inaccuracy of Mitchell's dates, as he was ostensibly confused merely about which internship involved the fraud.

However, if Mitchell began work at the paper in 1968, then even this correction makes a material misrepresentation, since the year of Mitchell's backdating was 1967, a year before his first internship, an error which tends to suggest a more deliberate number-fudging than if he were genuinely mixing up his summer internships.

Is this tangled web a bottomless pit of half-truths or can we peel back enough layers to reveal the light at the end of the tunnel?  Mary Katherine Ham is working on it.

Previously:
Recovering Fabulist Off the Wagon?
E&P Windbag a Recovering Fabulist
Windbag Reloaded
Hot Air Takes On MSM Windbag
Would I Lie To You?

Elsewhere:  Hot Air, Townhall, Protein Wisdom, Confederate Yankee, Ace of Spades HQ, Old War Dogs