On Dec. 24, CBSSportsline.com broke the news that the NBA was investigating Washington Wizards guard Gilbert Arenas for allegedly storing unloaded firearms in his locker at the Verizon Center.
Then, on Jan. 1, Peter Vecsey and David K. Li of the New York Post reported that Arenas and teammate Javaris Crittenton “drew guns on each other in the team’s locker room during a Christmas Eve dispute over a gambling debt.”
“It was the three-time all-star Arenas, 27, who went for his gun first, sources said, drawing on the 22-year-old Crittenton, who quickly brandished a firearm as well,” Vecsey and Li reported.
As one could imagine with an incident of such magnitude, the story was immediately picked up and run by a host of major news services all over the world.
Now, anyone who has followed this story knows that the Post got its facts completely wrong.
Forget losing credibility or opening yourself up to a libel lawsuit; these people don’t seem to understand that the press has a responsibility to get the story right, period.
We at The Daily Cougar take extra exception to incidents of laziness such as this.
Every story we run is thoroughly checked many times over to ensure that nothing but factually accurate and truthful news runs in our newspaper.
And, at the very least, if we run a mistake of any kind, we own up to it and print a correction.
While we cannot hold other media outlets up to our standards, The Daily Cougar will continue to be a shining beacon of truth in these times of murky journalism.
What separates the press from every dime-a-dozen blogger on the Internet is integrity — or at least it should be.
