The corrections paragraph to a Politico story that is so long that it calls the entire article into question. One wonders why Politico even allowed the October 1 story by Puerto Rican freelance journalist Alejandra Rosa to remain since such a large corrections section casts huge aspersions upon the veracity of the rest of her story still remaining. Will there be yet more corrections that will cause the already large corrections section to grow further and eat up the rest of the story?
Before we look at Rosa's heavily corrected story about financial pressures on Puerto Rico even before Hurricane Maria hit that island, let us ponder the bloated corrections section that draws most of the attention:
Corrections: An earlier version of this article stated that associates of the Koch brothers proposed and lobbied Congress to pass the law establishing Puerto Rico's fiscal control board. There is no evidence of any Koch involvement in the passage of the law. An earlier version of this article also stated that the fiscal control board had reduced the minimum wage in Puerto Rico to 4 dollars an hour. The board did not lower the minimum wage, the governor did. And the governor raised it this year. An earlier version of this article stated that the U.S. Congress imposed austerity measures on Puerto Rico. The fiscal control board established by Congress instructed the commonwealth to work towards balancing its budget. The governor decided what cuts to make.
Wow! A whole litany of corrections that does not exactly lend much credibility to what remains of the article. Perhaps we should look at some of the author's assertions before they too are absorbed by that corrections section:
This disaster began to unfold in Puerto Rico way before Hurricane María arrived.
It began when the austerity measures were imposed on our island last year, making serious cuts to infrastructure, health and housing.
It began with the Merchant Marine Act of 1920, known as the Jones Act, mandating that all goods and passengers must come to Puerto Rico on U.S. ships, a regulation that has been strangling our economy for decades.
It began in 1898, when the United States invaded our island but didn’t grant us representation in Congress, robbing us of a voice in times of catastrophe.
We’re told the federal government is sending help, but we don’t see it. And, in the meantime, Donald Trump, our president, is tweeting about football, reminding the world how Puerto Rico’s tragedy hurts Wall Street or castigating San Juan’s mayor as she tries to get relief for her people. If Hurricane María had landed in the U.S. mainland, I doubt Trump would be tweeting about football.
Hmm... Only states get voting representation on the House floor in Congress. Perhaps Politico should add that to the long list of corrections. Oh, and of course there was the obligatory jab at Trump which might have acted to ensure that the article remained despite the ridiculously massive corrections.
The lengthy corrections section did not go unnoticed by the Politico readers. Here are a few of their observations of the corrections section on steroids:
Holy crap, a massive paragraphs of corrections and retractions at the bottom of an article and you still run it? Why? This person's piece should be yanked in its entirety if they made that many screwups.
You have to love it when the corrections are half the size of the piece itself.
These are some pretty big corrections mentioned at the bottom here. Someone deserves a good caning for not doing a better job fact checking... Journalists should hold themselves to higher standards.
Isn't Politico supposed to fact check articles BEFORE they are published? WOW That's quite a long list of retractions. And I see the journalist is Puerto Rican, so it makes me wonder if the majority of Puerto Ricans also have a fundamental misunderstanding of why they finds their country $76 Billion in debt with absolutely nothing of benefit to show for that debt.
Well, that's quite a block of corrections, there. It must have killed you guys to have to remove that much Prog cat-nip from this piece.
Those corrections are terrifying. They deserve an entire article unto themselves, fully explaining what you HAD said, how you were wrong, and what the actual reality of the situation is. Any article with that many corrections, that massive in scope, should either be scrapped entirely, or be addressed in another full article, laying out explaination and deep clarification.
Based on the number of items corrected and the length of correction, probably best to delete this and start over.
Good lord, she's not a reporter, she's a Democrat hack. And not one who can get her facts straight.
So why did Politico allow this article to remain despite the fact that it was dominated by corrections? Could it be that Politico is attempting to earn a citation in the Guinness Book of Records?
