Accuracy, Accuracy, Accuracy
Such read the college newsroom sign posted by our managing editor, Marvelous Marv. Marv was known to go apoplectic over a fact error in a story — probably the only real-life example of Tex Avery Eyes we’ve seen.
And since our years as a college journalist just preceded Sarah Palin’s (and just followed John Wooden’s retirement at arch-nemesis UCLA), we particularly enjoyed the latest Going Rogue howler:
perhaps the most embarrassing gaffe so far is her mis-attributed quote to UCLA basketball legend John Wooden.
As the epigram to Chapter Three, “Drill, Baby, Drill,” Palin assigns the following remarks to the Hall of Fame hoops coach:
“Our land is everything to us… I will tell you one of the things we remember on our land. We remember our grandfathers paid for it — with their lives.”
Only the quote wasn’t by John Wooden. It was written by a Native American activist named John Wooden Legs in an essay entitled “Back on the War Ponies,” which appeared in a left-wing anthology, We Are the People: Voices from the Other Side of American History, edited by Nathaniel May, Clint Willis, and James W. Loewen.
Marv, wherever you are, pick your eyes off the floor.





grif‧ter
John Heilemann in New York magazine:
You know that guy who murdered those four police officers in cold blood up in Seattle? Well, guess what. Turns out the suspect was a prisoner in Arkansas, facing some 200 years of prison for various aggravated robberies and assaults until then Governor Mike Huckabee commuted his sentence after just 11 years.
You could have knocked me over with a feather: