Who is Montaous Walton? 
A few local journalists probably wish they’d never heard of him. The most recent: WUWM, which had aired a spot on the young man who seemed to be a promising college baseball player with Major League prospects.
The Milwaukee Courier published a bright feature about Mr. Walton back in February — then took it all back in June with a correction longer than the original story.
(Contrast the Courier‘s forthright response with that of the Community Journal, which also published reports on Walton. In May, the CJ‘s Troy Sparks ran with an item about Walton moving to a Minnesota Twins-affiliated AA club but noting that the team didn’t know anything about it. In June, Sparks apologized — not to readers, or to the baseball team’s management, but to Walton, who evidently claimed the earlier conversation was off the record. The kicker: Sparks’ apology appeared the day before the Courier’s lengthy expose of Walton’s deception.)
The Courier story also refers to a report that aired on WTMJ-TV Channel 4. There’s now no record of any TV report. In addition, the student paper at Milwaukee Area Technical College did a story about Walton a year ago; although no longer on the MATC Times website, it can be found in a Google cache.
Fast-forward to Aug. 24, when WUWM aired a story on Walton. On Monday, Oct. 4, Alex Runner, aide to Milwaukee Ald. Willie Hines, alerted the station to the Courier skin-back, and WUWM promptly pulled the piece from its archives. We have an inquiry into WUWM about the matter; we’ll post an update with the station’s response when we hear back.
We tried to reach Walton via a UW-Whitewater e-mail address he posted in an Internet profile but haven’t heard back.
We did find plenty of references to his storied prospects on the Web – but virtually all of them are from commenters on various online sports bulletin boards. And we encountered skeptics as well, who pointed out that the many different commenters praising Walton appeared to be the same person…
Update: “We got duped, pure and simple,” says WUWM general manager Dave Edwards, getting back to us Tuesday afternoon (Oct. 5). “We really now don’t know who this person is.”
He notes that when news director Marge Pitrof first heard
about Watson’s story of baseball dreams, she did some searching on the
Internet. “He’s written about in blogs and different sites,” Edwards
observes. Initially “there was nothing suspicious about it.” So
reporter Bob Bach did an interview, the story aired, and the rest is history.
Edwards says the public radio station staff is still mulling how
to respond, considering possibly a story that would look at how news
stories get reported and verified. “The lesson learned here is that you
just can’t take anything at face value any more. In a human interest
story, our trust [in people] is maybe a little too high. It’s embarrassing.”
And with that, on to Pressroom Buzz’s regular roundup of recent media news and commentary from all over.
Press releases as news: ReadMedia, a distributor of press releases that used to go to reporters and editors, now is syndicating its feed directly to online news sites, reports Paid Content. Which raises the question: When content is free, will only Deep Pockets provide the content? Or to put it another way, if news consumers won’t buy the news, who do you think will? The institutions and entities that will pay to tell the story they want to tell.
Bloodsuckers: Also from Paid Content, ex-Washington Post editor Leonard Downie calls news aggregators, such as Huffington Post, “parasites.” True enough, but the item’s one commenter points out the other side of the issue.
Audience tracking — two views:Will tracking who reads what online harm journalism or not? Two contrasting views at the Harvard Nieman Center’s website.
Also from Nieman: Slate shows how long-form journalism might have some promise on the Web.
Required reading: The New York Times reviews a new book, Proofiness — all about how liars can manipulate figures.
Bad headline, worse coverage: The original headline on this AP story spectacularly misfired, saying “Health care law making us muddle-minded.” Huh?! Somehow the law is responsible for our ignorance of it? Fortunately, the head was changed to the more neutral one it now carries. But the story itself suggests bigger questions about the relatively poor job the media have done in reporting the substance of health care reform rather than the misleading sound bites.
Speaking of health care, in the continuing annals of non-journalistic institutions delving into the vacuum for serious journalism, comes this recommendation from a Kentucky program for rural journalism: “There are several independent, reliable sources for information on the health-reform law. One is the Kaiser Family Foundation, which has a summary of the law, a timeline for implementation, an explanation of how it will expand access to coverage, and other useful information. ….”
The folly of forecasting: Back on Aug. 31, AP was forecasting gloom for the September markets. And just how has that turned out? Umm, a record rally.
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