Update: Mitchell had acknowledged his age twice in the previous version of the article and also stated it was a summer internship. Those items are in paragraphs five and six and have not changed. What he did was move it into the lead. You can see that in the old and new versions.
Still, I felt bad about it for years and (obviously) have never forgotten it. On the other hand, I was, at the time, just 19, it was a summer internship, and I'd only been on the job about a month.
One of the many alarming things about the Jayson Blair scandal is that he never grew up, and no one at The New York Times ever seemed to notice. My ethical breach at 19 in Niagara Falls was bad enough. One expects a bit more from a 27-year-old with years of experience in New York.
It appears as though there is a scandal breaking at Editor & Publisher. Bob Owens of the Confederate Yankee blog reported a story involving an old self-revealed lapse in ehtics by E&P Editor Greg Mitchell. The story appeared on on Owen's blog, and also at NewsBusters.
Now it seems as though Mitchell has gone back in and re-edited a three year old story to make his previous indiscretion appear less serious. He altered the text of the story, adding that his age was 19 and to claim that he was working as an intern at the time.
Owens updates the full story here on his blog. Screen captures of the alterations can be seen here and may later be added to this post. Ed Driscoll has discovered that the unaltered version of the story is available through the Wayback Machine.
