WFMY secretly flushes Mickens' $3 million whopper down the memory hole

We all make mistakes. WFMY's Frank Mickens made a big one last week. He reported that the City of Greensboro has spent $3,196,327 in legal and consulting fees attempting to reopen the White Street Landfill. According to official documents, Mickens had exaggerated the costs by almost $3 million dollars.

We all make mistakes. What separates the professionals, one would like to think, is how mistakes are handled. One would like to think that a professional like Mickens, certainly a storied institution like WFMY, would set about to correct misinformation with the same effort made to deliver the error -- you know, to make sure people aren't carrying around the misunderstanding of the original mistake.

Sadly, that's not the case with WFMY and Mickens on the $3 million error. After the mistaken report remained online, in text and video, for at least five days, the web page containing the error was deleted (hat tip, Jeff Martin). The entire page, gone.* No correction; no redirect to updated information; no efforts equal to those that originally conveyed the error to say to viewers, "Hey, we told you something that wasn't right and we want to make sure you know what was wrong and what the truth is because we respect you and want to make sure you trust us not to make you an idiot for believing us."

Nope. WFMY and Mickens appear to prefer to quietly sneak away from their errors even if it means leaving their audience stupider for it.

Here's what was deleted (Google cache has the original web page too):

* The uncorrected video remains available for now, though no longer embedded on the deleted page of the original story.