Sipple/Freep backs down.

So, I am kicking back, and I am enjoying the early beatdown that Bucky Badger is putting down in East Lansing.  Good to see; keep it up.  60 minutes of necessary violence.

Actually, I feared an unusual level of shocking violence in this game.  So much blood and mayhem, that I considered going out to see Drive instead.  

But as I am kicking back and weeding through old newspapers to throw away, I came across Friday's print-edition Free Press sports section, and the Gholston-suspension story which was the top headline, above the fold.

And there was the third paragraph of the story:

Gholston punched Michigan tackle Taylor Lewan on Saturday, his second personal foul of the game. Before the punch, Lewan held Gholston to the ground by his helmet. 

 

 

That's not such a bad paragraph.  It is hard to know what to call what Lewan did to Gholston, and it was a chippy play to be sure.

But what was so interesting to me was that that was not the way that paragraph was originally written.  When George Sipple and the Freep sports editors originally posted the story, Sipple wrote:

Before the punch, Gholston was dragged to the ground by his face mask by Lewan.   

I read that on Thursday afternoon when Sipple first posted it to the Freep website.  And I was shocked by the reckless inaccuracy in that reporting.  Sipple probably wanted to write it that way because he wanted it to be true.  It wasn't.

I called Sipple out in an e-mail to him, and posted this on MGoBlog:

http://mgoblog.com/comment/reply/60838/1296854 

Sipple was wrong; Gholston was not "dragged to the ground by his face mask by Lewan."  He corrected the later print-version.  I can only presume it was because he had been called out here.

Now at any good newspaper I can think of, a correction like that would be noted online.  Something like, "An earlier version of this story stated that Gholston had been dragged to the ground by his face mask; this version corrects that inaccuracy.  We regret the error."  But we're not talking about any good newspaper.  We're talking about the Detroit Free Press.