Mutha of a mistake

Metro Times news editor Curt Guyette kept ducking our calls all week.

He knew what we wanted: His reaction to seeing a misspelled word on last week’s cover for a major investigative piece he wrote. The story was a big one, taking an in-depth look at accusations that members of the Detroit Police Department shot an unarmed man and then engineered a cover-up of the incident.

All in all, a decent piece of journalism. But the front-page error, in the opinion of News Hits, looked damned bad. How could they screw up the word “alleged” for crissake? We wanted a response, and we weren’t going to be denied. Finally, after a deluge of threatening faxes produced no result, we made several harassing phone calls to Guyette’s home late at night. As usual, that did the trick. To get us off his back, Guyette issued this carefully worded statement:

“That was one big-assed blunder,” he conceded. “What makes me heartsick is the thought that it could hurt the credibility of the story inside. I feel terrible about it. A lot of people at this paper worked very hard getting that piece into print, and to see it marred by a flaw like that is very disappointing. I sincerely apologize to our readers and the subjects of the story for letting such a stupid mistake slip past.”

At press time, News Hits was still deciding whether this mea culpa is sufficient. On the other hand, we’ve also been anxiously watching the mailbox to see if the Detroit Police Department has issued a response to the allegations made in the story. So far, the silence has been deafening.