Apology To Trey Reeme

When you say something publicly, your comments are open to scrutiny, criticism, and disagreement from others. I most certainly do that to others, and I recognize that others have the right to — and will — do it to me.

But when you’re misquoted publicly, that statement is not fair game for scrutiny and critique.

And so I’d like to apologize to Trey Reeme. In a blog post from a few days ago, I took him to task for a statement that he allegedly made about replacing older credit union directors. It turns out he was misquoted.

Let me be clear about what I think my mistake was. It wasn’t that I didn’t validate that the quote was accurate. That was CU Times’ job. It was their responsibility to check with the people they’re quoting to ensure that they’re representing statements accurately.

No, my mistake was not checking with a friend before commenting on it. Not only should I have checked with Trey before publishing the post, but, in hindsight, I should have given him more credit from the start, and not even believed that he could have made those comments in the first place. But I didn’t, so I’m up to apology number two here.

I told Trey that if he wanted, I would pull the post from the blog. That certainly wouldn’t fix what happened, since the post is already out there, but it might save some future pain. Trey said he didn’t want me to take it down. Which I’m grateful for — because I do believe that the sentiment that he was accused of conveying really exists out there. But I will go back and edit the post to emphasize that aspect.

Technorati Tags: Credit Unions, Trey Reeme