The Other Paper Regrets The Error (But Not So Much)

Nearly every Thursday, you can open up The Other Paper, Columbus, Ohio's leading alternative newsweekly, and find, in a little gray box at the bottom of page 3, a correction. These aren't usually trivial little boo-boos like spelling errors, either, but major omissions or misstatements of basic facts that affect the very meaning of the story, often slanting it toward the paper's official editorial viewpoint on the issue being covered.

This week, for example, The Other Paper points out that there are indeed five members of the Downtown Streetcar Working Group with previous experience in matters of public transportation, rather than, as reported in last week's front page story, none. This "error," combined with the overall tone of the piece, served to leave readers with the impression that a streetcar line in downtown Columbus is an impractical pipedream doomed to fail and waste millions of municipal dollars in the process.

It appears that The Other Paper's writers (one hesitates to call them journalists) aren't about to let little things like facts or truth interfere with their predetermined notions.