Thread by @MattWelch

Here is a thing that everyone who has been in the eye of a media-storm, however small or insignificant, can tell you: It is amazing the basic factual stuff, let alone interpretative analysis, even decorated journalists will get wildly wrong.

I was involved w/ @KenLayne & former L.A. mayor @RichardJRiordan & others in a proposed startup weekly that got at least to the Zero Issue phase. Three SoCal boosters, one moderate Republican, one Ed Abbey-style iconoclast, one vaguely lefty libertarian. How were we described?

As a "neocon weekly" that was "marketing itself only to L.A.’s wealthiest," said Harold Meyerson. laweekly.com/news/hold-the-…

(Funny story about that, incidentally: reason.com/blog/2005/08/1…)

L.A. Magazine said that Layne & I "sound like Civil War re-enactors suiting up to restage creaky battles over 'political correctness' and 'liberal bias.'"

Two phrases I'm confident rarely saw the light of day at the original L.A. Examiner website.

theawl.com/2013/04/the-ri…

First big story about our newspaper in Prague back in the day, which ran in the L.A. Times, spelled my name W-e-l-s-h, got my age wrong, attributed the wrong quotes to one of our co-founders, and misspelled yet another co-founder's name (while also getting her age wrong).

Which was the least of the article's problems, btw. They ran an unrebutted claim by our competitor and former business manager saying that we spent "most" of our seed capital on "rent and alcohol." Which, I mean, we TRIED, but it was hard to rack up big bar tabs in '90s Prague.

Thus began a stampede of some of the worst journalism I have ever witnessed, including by 60 Minutes. Then again, that's how it *always* works--when you really really know the subject, you become shocked at how many people are shoddy at it. web.archive.org/web/2004060223…

Not holding myself up here as a paragon of virtue--the profession is rife with error, we are too many of us generalists getting up to speed on a subject in 90 minutes, etc. But I do think it's important to be haunted, and self-constrained, by the question: What if I'm *wrong*?

Meanwhile, understand that just about everyone who ever gets caught in the eye of a media storm, no matter how trivial, comes out of it a little bit...different. You cannot look at journalism the same way again.