Carol Klingel had to chuckle. The New York Times was reporting -- on the front page, no less -- that her son, a Marine scout who had been wounded in Iraq, struggled with flashbacks, "his mind wandering from images of his girlfriend back in Ohio to the sight of an exploding fireball."
The story was wrenching. It was also wrong. For starters, Lance Cpl. James Klingel didn't have a girlfriend. He had broken up with his most recent sweetheart before he was deployed to the Gulf.
"We were laughing about it. I kept asking him, which girl would be thinking that she was the girl mentioned in the story," his mom said.
The Klingels knew that reporter Jayson Blair had gotten the facts wrong.
But they didn't call the New York Times to complain. They didn't write to demand a correction.
In a telling sign of how little Americans seem to trust the press, many of the people Blair wrote falsely about in the last seven months shrugged off his mistakes as more examples of sloppy, melodramatic reporting.
Some protested strenuously, demanding corrections, only to give up in frustration. Others never knew about the errors because they did not read the articles that put their voices in front of millions of newspaper readers across the nation.
For the Klingels and others like them, however, the embellishments -- and even the outright fiction -- they saw in Blair's work seemed hardly worth squawking about. It was more or less what they anticipated.
"You expect people are going to get misquoted, or quoted out of context," said Carol Klingel, a high school art teacher.
Blair's article wrongly described her son as permanently disabled from his combat injuries. It exaggerated his emotional distress. And it attributed comments to the wounded Marine that he did not remember making -- including the dramatic ending to the story, which quoted Klingel as saying he was still looking over his shoulder, worried "about who might come shooting at me out of the bush."
Her son was upset, Carol Klingel recalled. But she figured that the story "wasn't all that wrong" -- nothing "earth-shatteringly false," as she put it -- so it wouldn't be worth pursuing a correction.
Many Americans share Klingel's low expectations for journalistic accuracy.
Except for a surge of support for reporters after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, "positive evaluations of news organizations on issues like trust, credibility and arrogance have all been declining steadily" for more than a decade, said Carroll Doherty, editor of the Pew Research Center for People and the Press.
