On Friday, I posted a story from WVEC in Virginia, which stated three dozen dog carcasses were allegedly found by Federal investigators on the Surry County property owned by Michael Vick. It became such a national story that even ESPN Radio allegedly reported the same story via WVEC on some of their broadcasts.
Well apparently WVEC jumped the gun on the situation, because they’ve since taken down the story and replaced it with one dedicated to Surry County prosecutor Gerald Poindexter and how he’s upset with the way the Feds are now involved in the situation.
How can WVEC misconstrue the situation that badly? Did they make up that dog carcasses found or did they really know and just shouldn’t have reported it without the Feds releasing the information first? Either way, these national media outlets better get their crap together in reporting what’s really going on with this whole Vick-dog fighting fiasco. You can’t report something as serious as “Over three dozen dog carcasses were allegedly found on Vick’s property” and then later in the day pull the story and replace it with something else. If it comes out later that no dog carcasses were found on the property and this was all just a misread on WVEC’s part, then they should be ashamed of themselves just like Vick should if there really was dead dogs buried at one of his homes.
And shame on me for believing that there are journalists out there actually doing their jobs in reporting on this situation and not jumping the gun on something as big as this. What a freaking mess.
UPDATE: WVEC has a correction on its main page about Friday’s article, but now the network is blaming ESPN:
Correction: Friday, WVEC.com reported information about dog remains allegedly found at the Vick property. We attributed the information to ESPN Radio. That information was not reported by ESPN and cannot be confirmed by WVEC. We regret the error.
Interesting, WVEC didn’t “attribute” the news to ESPN Radio in the orginial article. Hmm…
