Whitlock extensively misquoted by alma mater’s newspaper

Poor Jason Whitlock. The Kansas City Star and Fox Sports columnist can’t even get quoted correctly in his alma mater’s newspaper.

Last week, the Ball State Daily News reported Whitlock had claimed he wasn’t getting paid shit but was a patriot for not living large while serving his country by writing his sports columns and challenging authority.

Here’s how Whitlock’s quote originally played in the Daily News:

“The

sacrifice I’ll make is that I’ll never be rich,” Whitlock said. “I

thought that this was really the most patriotic thing I could do:

challenge the authority. Our country was built on that; America exists

because some of us told England to go fuck themselves. We have to have

people like that to take on that challenge.”

We called bullshit, and Poynter’s Jim Romenesko featured Whitlock’s quote on his blog. Uh, about that. The Daily News‘ editor wrote a letter to Romenesko explaining that Whitlock had been misquoted … a lot.

Our online story erroneously implied that Whitlock said his current feeling is that he’s making a sacrifice through his journalistic efforts and will never be rich.

In fact, Whitlock indicated in his talk that this was his attitude as a young journalist. Whitlock in his talk indicated that he is justly well compensated. He indicated his motivation remains, however, to challenge conventional assumptions and to challenge those in power.

The Daily News also got its facts wrong on a story Whitlock told about witnessing a fight between two players on the football team. Whitlock told the students that he challenged the coaching staff (he was a member of the team) for punishing a black student but not the other student involved in the altercation. The student newspaper claimed Whitlock had written about the incident. He hadn’t.

If only he’d lectured about “strange tang.” I bet the talk would have been so memorable, no one could have misquoted him.