Poor Mojo's Newswire

Michael Poret, a 58-year-old investment adviser who works on upscale Rodeo Drive, has been arrested in connection with a rash of window smashes along the Ventura Boulevard corridor, according to the Los Angeles Police Department. Poret is allegedly responsible for a string of broken windows dating as far back as the beginning of the year, the LAPD said in a statement today. Police allege he used a slingshot and other weapons to shoot windows in numerous buildings with marbles and nuts. The suspect, wearing white gloves, would pull up in a silver SUV and fire the objects, often from the opposite side of the wide avenues. While no motive has been listed for the series of attacks, LAPD Det. Luie Velasquez told the Los Angeles Times, “for whatever reason, these individuals get some kind of thrill from smashing windows.” The suspect would allegedly strike when streets were most empty, according to LAPD. ”Most of the crimes occurred along Ventura Boulevard between Haskell Avenue and Balboa Boulevard, but stretched from Sherman Oaks to Woodland Hills. The majority of incidents happened during hours of darkness, in the early morning or late evening,” LAPD said in a statement.

Now, I don’t expect a publication that responds to daily or weekly news to do New Yorker-style fact checking. But it should demand that anyone who writes for it document all of his or her factual assertions – and an editor should check that documentation to see that it actually matches what the writer says. That’s how it works at the Times, or at least how it works for me. I supply a list of sources with each column submission; for yesterday’s piece it looked like this: $4.3 trillion: http://www.taxpolicycenter.org/numbers/displayatab.cfm?Docid=3301&DocTypeID=5 lines 2, 3 and 5 Ryan cuts: http://www.cbpp.org/cms/index.cfm?fa=view&id=3723 (I count his Medicaid cuts relative to current policy, not policy including Obamacare) Disproportionate benefits at top: http://www.taxpolicycenter.org/numbers/displayatab.cfm?Docid=3337&DocTypeID=2 Ryan award: http://www.thefiscys.com/content/sen-kent-conrad-rep-paul-ryan-and-gov-mitch-daniels-named-2011-fiscy-award-recipients Baseline: http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-ryan-20120817,0,1246452.story Each time I send in a column draft, the copy editor runs quickly through the citations, making sure that they match what I assert. Sometimes the editor feels that I go further than the source material actually justifies; in that case we either negotiate a rewording, or drop the assertion altogether. Oh, and weasel-wording isn’t acceptable – implying something the facts don’t support is no more OK than stating it outright. And despite all this, sometimes an error slips through. In that case, the response is a print correction.