The Atlanta-Constitution on Wednesday issued a statement that it was making a correction to a July 27 story regarding its investigation into its recent investigation on how Georgia’s football program handles allegations of sexual abuse.
The paper also announced it had fired investigative reporter Alan Judd, who worked on the article.
“Our editorial integrity and the trust our community has in us is at the core of who we are,” Editor-in-Chief Leroy Chapman said in a statement. “After receiving the university’s letter, we assigned our team of editors and lawyers to carefully review each claim in the nine-page document we received, along with some additional source material that supported the original story. We identified errors that fell short of our standards, and we corrected them.”
Georgia officials have yet to comment.
The corrections and action on Judd were taken following a nine-page letter sent on July 11 by UGA attorney Michael M. Raeber. The newspaper declined the letter’s request to retract the article.
Per Chapman, the AJC found no cases of fabrications in the story but did discover two elements in the story that did not meet the newspaper’s journalistic standards.
Judd was fired for violating those journalistic standards.
AJC editors said they could not substantiate assertations in the June 27 article that 11 players remained with the team after women reported violent encounters. Chapman said “the precise count of 11 players” could not be substantiated under AJC standards.
The statement also said a second error improperly joined two statements a detective made separately into a single quotation. Per the statement, the sentences did not change the meaning of the quote, but the way it was presented to readers failed to meet AJC standards.
“A critical part of our mission is to hold people and institutions accountable. It is a responsibility we take seriously,” Chapman said. “We must hold ourselves to this same standard and acknowledge when we fall short, which we have here.
“We apologize to the university and our readers for the errors.”
