A Correction of Breathtaking Proportions

(UPDATE 9:48 a.m. PT: I've reached out to Joe to get his reaction. Will post it if he is willing and permitted to respond. In the meantime, read a new development here.)
(UPDATE 6:23 pm PT: The correction is now appended to the top of the story on the Web.)

Read this. All of it. Click on it to make it big enough to see. Now. Then we'll talk.

Wow. I had to scan this in because the Las Vegas Sun didn't post it on their pretty new Web site. They also didn't append it to the Web version of the story that spawned it, as is standard for most newspapers. Perhaps that's because had they done so, they would have had to let everyone see just how much of a lie the closing statement is: "All these errors tended to give the story an anti-Summerlin tone, which was not intended... ." That's funny because, from the very first sentences of the piece, it was clear that the entire intention was to snark about the rich, white-bread, partly racist, insulated folks of Summerlin and how fitting it was that a white local high school student would be gunned down to shatter the myth and ignorance of Summerlinsers. And this sentence surely wasn't intended to be fair: "The picture painted by the numbers, then, shows that contrary to the rosy marketing and public relations image, Summerlin is far from immune to the ills found in any major community."

I must say I am clobbered by the shoddiness of the original piece mainly because its author, Joe Schoenmann, is generally a terrific reporter and a wonderful writer. I've known Joe since our days working together in the late 1990s at the Review-Journal, I've referred many editors to him when I either can't or didn't want to do certain freelance assignments and I've often said that I'm lucky he never decided to freelance or I might really have some competition in this town from someone else who, like me, has the versatility to handle just about anything.

But yikes-o-rama on this one. He used comments from anonymous crazies on the R-J Web site to attempt to reflect the views of some proportion of something as mammoth as one of the largest master-planned developments in America, with a 100,000+ population larger than most U.S. cities? He mocks the sales brochure of Summerlin which is, after all, a sales brochure and reads like any you'll ever see anywhere? What does anyone expect it to say, "It's kinda nice living up here, but just in case we give every family a Lo-Jack"?

Most disturbing about this piece is that its thesis was predetermined -- gangbanging invades pristine Summerlin! -- and filled in by some truly lazy reporting that led to some of the serious factual mistakes found in there. It's clear Joe didn't leave his desk for this one, which is OK in some cases; I am, after all, the guy who covered the Monte Carlo fire from New York City, though not because I wanted to. But Joe is writing specifically about a geographic region and the views of its residents and he didn't go to the school grounds or neighborhoods to talk to anyone? The sources quoted in the piece are, in total:

* A school board member
* A Summerlin executive
* Anonymous kooks writing on a Web site
* As a "woman on the street," (journalism parlance for an average person reflective of general sentiment), the wife of one of the most prominent public relations gurus in the state.

This correction also took a full week in coming. And I'd love to know what happened behind the scenes over there. I mean, it is a full-fledged grovel to Summerlin. In fact, some of it is unnecessary self-flagellation pointing up problems in the piece that actually aren't correction-worthy.

It can't be that they were threatened with legal action, as who would the plaintiffs be? Could it be that the Summerlin brass exploded and made a threat to withhold advertising? Cried foul that the Sun, owned by the Greenspun family, is an arch-rival as developers of Green Valley and would never write such a piece about their own territory where, presumably, the brochures also don't advertise the crime rate?

But wait, the Las Vegas Sun doesn't have advertising; it's folded into the R-J, which carries all the advertising water and shares it with them in some insignificant way that can't possibly cover the Sun's operating expenses. Oh, but Greenspun Media Group has lots of other publications (full disclosure: I write for two, Vegas Magazine and Las Vegas Weekly), so maybe that's where the threats came from?

Or, perhaps, the Sun's editors realized that they'd made an honest-to-goodness &%&W#-up and just wanted to come clean for the sake of integrity. If so, bravo. A nine-paragraph correction is above-and-beyond.

Anyway, I'm really disappointed by Joe on this one. Sometimes we get complacent, and I hope he's learned not to do that with this experience. If you want to see just how good he can be, check out this Las Vegas Life piece on brothel fugitive Joe Conforte. Brilliant.