Jon Stewart made some very good points last week about journalists' responsibility to check what sources tell them against the factual record. His particular issue was with financial reporters' complicity with the dangerous games Wall Street traders have been playing with Americans' money, but the point can and should be generalized to irresponsible reporting everywhere.

Take, for example, media coverage of the Ward Churchill trial, which began last week. While sitting over my morning coffee one day last week, I ran across the Chronicle of Higher Education's article on the opening remarks. It contained the following sentence about what Churchill's lawyer said to the jury: "Mr. Lane said Mr. Churchill's essay 'set off an explosion' when it first drew media attention in 2005, with conservative media figures like Sean Hannity and Bill O'Reilly, organizations like the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, and politicians on both the state and national levels calling for Mr. Churchill's firing. ... 'The media was out of control. It was an absolute mob mentality,' Mr. Lane said. 'As you know, a mob mentality is no mentality whatsoever' ".

That made me blink. I read it again, just to make sure my inadequately caffeinated eyes weren't playing tricks on me, and they weren't. Churchill's lawyer had told a lie about ACTA, and the Chronicle of Higher Ed had reproduced it without comment -- despite the fact that, as a higher ed publication, one could reasonably expect them to have recognized the falsehood there, or at least to have recognized the need to fact check. After all, back in 2005, when elected officials and reporters and others really were calling for Churchill to be fired for his "little Eichmanns" comment, ACTA loudly and publicly defended Churchill's expressive rights. (FIRE defended Churchill, too, as did David Horowitz.) But the Chronicle seems to have lost track of that bit of the public record.

The Chronicle of Higher Education has since scrubbed away the problem sentence. The article as it now appears on the site bears no trace of the false accusation it reproduced last week--nor does it register that it has been revised.

But the Chronicle was not the only publication to reproduce Churchill's lawyer's factually challenged account of the facts. Yesterday, ACTA issued the following statement:

In recent days, it has been alleged that the American Council of Trustees and Alumni demanded Ward Churchill be fired because he compared the victims of September 11 to Nazis. These irresponsible accusations have been repeated by respected media outlets including The Denver Post and the Associated Press. These charges are categorically false.

On February 11, 2005, ACTA publicly urged, in a news release, that the University of Colorado not punish Churchill for his statement on the victims of the World Trade Center attacks and that CU grant him due process.

Churchill did receive academic due process. After numerous committees of his peers probed his scholarship, culminating in a finding of "multiple acts of plagiarism, fabrication and falsification," then-President Hank Brown reviewed the findings and recommended that the Board of Regents fire Churchill due to his clear dereliction of academic standards. ACTA supported this decision.

It is indisputable: ACTA insisted from the beginning that Churchill be granted due process, not that he be fired because of his views, objectionable as they may have been.

It is disappointing that journalists covering the Churchill trial have not made any efforts to contact ACTA regarding allegations made.