Petrelis Files

SF Chron Error:
Parking Attendant at Rainbow Grocery?

Last Wednesday, Heather Knight of the San Francisco Chronicle co-wrote an article about political operatives trying to convinced interim Mayor Ed Lee to run for a full term. Knight spoke with me about my run-in with some of the operatives at a local food coop, and I made it clear the person who was being photographed was a homeless man, not a worker at the coop.

This is what appeared in the story about the homeless guy and the photo shoot, bolding mine:

[Left Coast Communications executive Enrique] Pearce also hired a photographer to take pictures of regular folks around the city - including a parking attendant at Rainbow Grocery - holding a sign with a drawing of Lee's famously mustachioed face along with "Run, Ed, Run." The photos will be shown on a new website launching later this week, said photographer Luke Thomas. Blogger Michael Petrelis spotted the grocery store photo session and wrote about it. ...

Anyone who shops at Rainbow knows this is the last place to find a parking attendant. The paper has not run a correction about this error, and I spoke with Knight yesterday about her mistake. She said she was told the man was a parking attendant, and I assumed this incorrect info came from either Pearce or Thomas.

Regardless of what she was told, I said it was wrong info and warranted a correction. Knight only promised to look into it and today a correction did not appear in the recycled-tree or online edition of the Chronicle.

Allow me to digress and call attention to the crappy corrections web page for the Hearst-owned daily. It claims to list corrections to Chronicle and AP wire stories, but several of the stories, such as this AP article, contain no correction. A search reveals the paper has not corrected the parking attendant mistake.

If Chronicle employees give a hoot about credibility in all its coverage, they will quickly own up to the mistake to their dwindling number of readers.