As they say in the movie trailers, “This time, it’s personal.” That’s because it’s about me.

Over at The Burbank Leader (owned by, you saw it coming, the LA Times), they’re reporting this story:

Burbank Democrats elect officers

The Burbank Democratic Club has selected its officers for the 2007 year. Club member Janet Reynolds was elected president and David Dobson was elected vice president.

Club secretary Larry Nemecek and treasurer Ken Ahern will retain their posts. Outgoing president Lee Wochner is taking a seat on the executive board.

Wochner and club member Dana Ragle will travel to the 2007 state Democratic Convention in April.

The club’s next meeting on March 28 at the Hill Street Café will feature former Assemblyman Dario Frommer, who will speak about his career and future plans. For more information, call (818) 288-2649.

Before this story ran, I sent an email to my fellow members of the executive board wondering what the Leader would get wrong and offering a few ideas. Well, I was way off-base; the Leader found a unique way to get far more wrong than I suggested. Here’s what they got wrong:

1. I’m not “taking a seat” on the executive board — I was already on it, as president. Now that I’m the immediate past president, I still have a seat. I believe we told them this.
2. They have misspelled Ken Ahearn’s name. Yet again. Remember that first rule of journalism I keep quoting? “Get people’s names right.”
3. While it is technically true that “Wochner and club member Dana Ragle will travel to the 2007 state Democratic Convention in April,” it isn’t because of an election by the Burbank Democratic Club. We were elected by Democratic voters in the 43rd Assembly District. (Which I believe we told them.) This is a huge distinction. Dana and I aren’t representing the club, which is comprised primarily of Democrats in Burbank — we’re representing 190,000 Democrats in a large chunk of Los Angeles County. This reporting is doubly wrong — both in implying that it was a club election, and in not making it clear that we’re delegates to the convention rather than “travelers.”

With regard to my election as delegate, I previously covered some of this ground here.

I show up in the media only occasionally and I don’t generally have time to correct the errors. (And by “errors,” I mean factual errors, not opinions. I mean verifiably erroneous reporting, the sort that should not be reported by reporters, or should be caught by editors or fact-checkers.) What must life be like if you’re an actual media presence? The Burbank Leader isn’t out to get me, they’ve just made mistakes; but what if you find yourself on the wrong side of The Drudge Report, or Fox News, or a producer at CNN or 60 Minutes? What must it feel like to wake up every morning and hear your name on the radio, on television, see it in newspapers and magazines, and feel to the core of your being that that is not you? And the only thing you have to back it up with is facts, and facts just aren’t that interesting any more.

This entry was posted on Saturday, March 24th, 2007 at 10:18 pm and is filed under On being, On reading, Thoughts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.