Dart to The Oregonian for rolling over an obvious mathematical mistake, and thereby opening up otherwise admirable reporting to attack. When the paper researched the history of all-terrain vehicles, it found something startling: though manufacturers had made a deal with government regulators in 1988 not to produce ATVs with less lateral stability than those already on the market, the government hadn’t tested the machines for compliance since 1991. So The Oregonian hired an engineer to see if the industry was taking advantage of the lax regulation, and to demonstrate how easy it would be to resume testing, according to Tom Detzel, who edited the resulting articles. For convenience sake, the paper hired a local engineer and supplied him with an engineering paper outlining the government test. The engineer tested four off-the-lot ATVs, and came back with results far more damning than the paper expected. Detzel’s team considered getting a second opinion, but decided instead to have the engineer recheck his own work. This time the results were dramatically different, but still showed that two of the four vehicles failed the government test. The Oregonian used these numbers in a major May series on four-wheeler safety and published its engineer’s final report as a Web extra. But in late June, under a concerted assault by the ATV industry, The Oregonian retracted the study and admitted that its engineer made imprecise measurements, and that in fact all tested ATVs had met the safety standard. Moving from bad to worse, the paper conceded that its engineer had also used a version of the government formula for calculating stability that was so oversimplified as to be unrecognizable. Detzel acknowledges that he missed the errors, but says he doesn’t regret the team’s choice of engineer, saying that “he seemed competent, and he is competent.” Detzel...

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