I'm guessing that most of you didn't see the 2007 film Resurrecting the Champ. I wouldn't blame any of you - Samuel L. Jackson's performance was the one, great thing in the movie.
Still, it's worth mentioning the real story, which was written for the LA Times by J.R. Moehringer, despite how the movie incorrectly depicted the facts, is actually a story of a series of mistakes in journalism taking place with the ultimate result being that the process got it right.
J.R. Moehringer met an elderly homeless man on the street and eventually started looking into the man's story. The man, known as Champ, claimed to be former boxer Bob Satterfield. Satterfield, although never competing for a championship, was a well known contender back in the day. Champ had displayed an encyclopedic knowledge of Satterfield's life and career. It was enough for J.R. Moehringer to maintain the relationship with Champ, continue to dig, and write a story of great quality and detail.
Obviously, a lot of the writers and staff were excited about the story. It could've been a groundbreaking work of sports journalism. Since Champ expectedly had no identification, the process of verifying that he was who he said he was more difficult.
Still, the paper demanded identification be verified before publication; and, that turned out to spare a lot of people embarrassment (until the film lied about it). Champ wasn't Satterfield. He was a boxer in the same weight class at the same time and had faced several of the same opponents. Satterfield had, in fact, died twenty years earlier.
We can talk all we want about how Moehringer got sloppy and let his desire for the big story to cloud his judgment. Still, this was before wikipedia and Google. It wasn't as easy to verify all this stuff and they still did.
Still, even if they hadn't done their work and published it, I do believe that there would have been a much bigger firestorm that we'd see now. There would have been very lengthy retractions and apologies written.
You contrast that with Taylor Lorenz and the Washington Post today and you see how far we've fallen.
Compared to everything Times got wrong in the mid-90s, Lorenz claiming that she reached out to two people who she heavily criticized for comment and that they declined seems innocuous; but, it shouldn't be passed off the way that it is.
For how imperfect the Times story was in how everybody handled each beat of the process, there's no indication that Moehringer lied. Lorenz clearly lied and she's a repeat offender.
Moehringer would have done a lot of work putting out fires and regaining credibility if he got duped all the way to the printing presses. Lorenz's falsehoods are so simple and so internal to her own moral compass that we should be more offended that she still has a job. This isn't getting a fact wrong through sloppy mistakes - this is claiming that she wrote emails that she didn't and that she received emails in response that she didn't. She could have easily chosen to leave the lie out and just say that this is her perception and opinion; but, no, she had to call specific people out, lie that she reached out and lie that they replied and said no.
Then, in normal fashion from the Washington Post, they printed a small correction followed by an editor's note. The problem is, they still decided to lie. They admitted that a mistake was made about contacting one of the two sources for comment; but, the other had been contacted. That was a lie because they only reached out to that contact after the article came out and never requested a comment.
Why dwell on this?
Well, it's because journalists are never going to stop being human beings. They will make mistakes. They will let things slide through the cracks from time to time. They'll miss things. They'll print false statements. We need keep forgiving honest mistakes when the people who make them respond with honesty and contrition and do the best they can to make things right.
The Post and Taylor Lorenz aren't making honest mistakes. They're lying and they're lying because they figure that they have the right to do it. Most people still respect the Post (hell, even I share articles from them from time to time) and the Post realizes correctly that it's still one of the biggest publications in the world with a long history - they incorrectly think that this vindicates them in playing fast and loose with the facts. Finally, they assume that most of the readers that they have won't care all that much and they're sadly correct about that. Most people don't care what Lorenz has clearly lied about so long as she keeps saying what they want to hear and so long as she keeps pretending to be a victim in all of this.