More Fiction From La Socialista

There are a lot of reasons newspaper circulation is dwindling these days, not the least of which is that these MSM dinosaurs are often every bit as long on agendas and short on the “facts” as the blogs and new media websites that are rapidly taking their place.

And we’re not just talking about certain “reputable” news outlets running commercials for big government, or sitting on stories that big government wants squashed, we’re talking about printing flat out false information – and then refusing to correct it.

Or even worse, pretending they never made a mistake to begin with.

What do we mean?  Well, take the latest exercise in revisionist history being perpetrated by one of South Carolina’s largest major daily newspapers, The (Columbia, S.C.) State, a.k.a. La Socialista.

Known in journalism circles as a “rowback,” this brand of revisionist reporting occurs when a newspaper claims to have fixed an error by promising to get the information correct in future editions – you know, instead of going back and acknowledging its original mistake.

Well, no stranger to mistakes, La Socialista took this concept one step further by flat out lying about what it had reported in the first place.

The story we’re referring to has to do with our utterly irrelevant and worthless governor, Mark Sanford, and the number of times he has ditched a security detail that he’s tried his damnedest to make irrelevant, too.

According to La Socialista‘s Sunday editions …

“In July, The State reported that Sanford left or entered the mansion grounds 38 times without security in 2008, and 39 times in the first few months of this year.”

Pretty innocuous right?  Problem is, it’s a flat out lie, at least according to what the paper actually reported in July.

“Gov. Mark Sanford left the Governor s Mansion without a security escort, 38 times in 2008. In the first six months of this year, he left the mansion without security, 39 times …

… Those trips are about one-third of the 195 trips Sanford made from the mansion, with or without security, over that 18-month period….

Wait … is it “left or entered” or is it just “left?”  Clearly, in July the paper was counting only departures, but five months later, it is referring to comings and goings.

What gives?  The number of trips didn’t change, did it?

According to a source at the S.C. Department of Public Safety, The State actually double-counted back in July because its reporters didn’t understand the difference between arrivals and departures.

Of course, rather than admitting this mistake, The State “fixed” the error three months later by changing its facts to fit the number, rather than changing its number to fit the facts.

Put simply, they deliberately misstated what they had previously reported.

It gets worse, though.

In addition to inaccurately counting comings and goings, The State also didn’t realize there were two sets of logs for each day – one for the mansion’s front gate, and one for the mansion’s back gate.  That means when the governor left one gate, it was noted at both, but The State counted it as two departures rather than one.

Like South Carolina’s failed education establishment (which La Socialista loves to apologize for), the paper is “doubling down on dumbing down.”

By failing to distinguish between arrivals and departures (and failing to recognize that two different gates were counting the same trips), The State has inaccurately quadrupled the number of “security-free” trips taken by the governor.

That’s right, quadrupled.

Now don’t get us wrong … no matter whether we’re talking about 80 or 20 trips, Sanford showed incredibly poor judgment in ditching his security detail.  Hell, he’s shown incredibly poor judgment for months now, one of many reasons why we’ve been pushing for his resignation since June.

But Sanford’s poor judgment doesn’t change the fact that The State not only got this story completely wrong – and is now deliberately attempting to conceal its own fundamental errors in reporting.

Seriously … and they say the blogs are bad!

As an interesting side note, the reporter on this story – Cliff LeBlanc – has earned a reputation for one-sided reporting and playing “fast and loose” with the facts.

Which is nothing new at La Socialista.

In 2007, LeBlanc printed almost verbatim a report generated by a Senate Committee aimed at discrediting prisons director Jon Ozmint, with whom LeBlanc has quarreled in the past.   The allegations contained in the report were blared across the front page of La Socialista in a 2000-word feature story.

Of course, this year when the Legislative Audit Council cleared Corrections of these allegations, the embattled agency received a mere 519 words buried deep within in the paper.

How’s that for fair and balanced?

FITS has also learned that LeBlanc may have had an even more personal reason to target state law enforcement agencies.

According to a DPS source, LeBlanc solicited for a job at the agency not long after director Mark Keel took the helm.  Wisely, DPS said thanks but no thanks.

LeBlanc wasn’t immediately available for comment.

Meanwhile his editor, Eileen Wadell, declined to comment for our story.