Correction to 2008-03-27 Article in The Voice

I sent this letter to Langara College student newspaper The Voice (text colour added):

I appreciate The Voice’s coverage of my proposal to sponsor voter-funded media (VFM) at Langara College, most recently the article “No online venue for VFM at college” in your March 27 issue. Unfortunately I was misquoted in that article, so would like to set the record straight. I have posted (at www.votermedia.org/langara/correction.html) a recording and transcript of the interview on which the article was based.

The misquote that I especially want to correct is: “Mark Latham says the school’s indecision is creating student disinterest. Students are losing the initiative to dig deeper for better information, he said.” I did not say that, nor would I say it. I wouldn’t want my relationship with Langara College harmed by this attribution of criticism that I did not make.

I place a very high value on the role of professional journalism in a democracy. I think our society does not value journalists enough, and I hope to change that with the VFM project. So I’m excited about the possibility of working with student journalists at Langara. We all learn from our mistakes, and I hope that correcting these misquotes can help us learn how to raise our journalistic standards.

Mark Latham
Founder, VoterMedia.org

Here's the part of their March 27 article “No online venue for VFM at college” containing misquotes (text colour added):

VFM’s founder Mark Latham says the school’s indecision is creating student disinterest. Students are losing the initiative to dig deeper for better information, he said. VFM is an online venue of media outlets that allows students to choose who to trust when they are deciding on their political leaders. The information is unbiased and forces media outlets to up their game to win the grant, according to Latham. Students then vote for their most trusted outlet. “VFM also creates competition between medias by offering monetary grants,” said Latham. “This ensures students’ future information will be accurate.”

I did not make the statements in red above; nor would I make them. Also, what is presented as a verbatim quote above can not be found in the transcript or the recording. I didn’t say it.

Linked here are the entire transcript and recording of what I said in the interview for the above article. That was my only interview with this journalist. One other source of my statements that she had was an email, which I have appended to the transcript.

-- Mark Latham