If you are like me, then most of the news you consume is bad news: bad people doing bad things, otherwise good people doing careless and hurtful things, bad things happening to good people, good things happening to bad people, etc. But at ENV we like to highlight praiseworthy conduct whenever we find it, hoping to inspire some good copycat behavior.
In that spirit we recently we pointed those interested in education reform to the example of Tennessee, which passed a well-crafted academic freedom bill in 2012. Today we draw your attention to a fine instance of integrity in reporting, a good example for journalists.
Two weeks ago I testified in Denver on an academic freedom bill then before the Colorado House Education Committee, CO HB 1089. Ivan Moreno of the Associated Press covered the hearing, and originally quoted me in the Denver Post as uttering the following words:

What this bill would do is not take evolution out of schools, or put evolution in, but actually increase the teaching of evolution and get people to really inquire about it and learn as much as possible.

That’s not exactly what I said, though. What I remembered saying, and what an audio recording of the hearing confirmed, was that the bill would not put religion into schools. So I asked Ivan to swap out the second instance of “evolution” in the quote above for the word “religion,” since it was important then and remains important now to emphasize that an academic freedom bill like the one in Colorado would increase science teaching in science class, on evolution and other science subjects, and would rightly keep religious teaching out of public school.
Good journalists pride themselves on paying close attention to what they see and hear. They do their best to print only accurate statements, since they want readers to trust them. So it is no fun for a journalist to put a correction on the wire after a story has been published far and wide. But to Ivan’s credit, he listened again to the recording, caught the earlier mistake, wrote up a corrected piece, and sent it out to editors all over. And with that he set the record straight.
Two cheers for Ivan and the AP! May their tribe increase.