We Messed Up, and It’s Important That People Know About It
From Dustin & David
Yesterday we wrote an article about Grace Community Church and former elder Hohn Cho, questioning his choice of employment and disparaging his discernment because of it. We (falsely) believed that his employer, a bioscience company, was purchasing aborted fetal tissue for experimentation and that he was in a position to know about it while turning a blind eye. Basically, “He must’ve known they were doing scientific study on aborted babies, as the chief ethics officer, but did and said nothing.” Thankfully, someone read the article, realized that we got some details wrong, and publicly rebuked us.
Rather than double down on our error, we realized that we misunderstood some technical jargon, made a bad inference because of it, and quickly retracted it with full disclaimers.
Why? Because we sinned. We sinned against Cho, and we sinned against God.
Because we believe in full transparency, we encourage all our readers to read our articles with a critical eye and call us out when we fall short or get something wrong. We don’t want to covertly edit and correct an offending article and then not address it, hoping it dies and is never heard from again.
Instead, we want to make it twice as public as our mistake. We believe it is a sin to bear false witness and spread bad information, even if it was inadvertent, and this is one way we offer accountability.
Our standard policy is to throw the article with our corrections in the Corrections/ Retraction page while keeping the record intact. However, we didn’t get a few details wrong with relatively minor implications, but we really got it wrong, causing reputational destruction. Given the egregious nature of our error, it became apparent that leaving it up ran the risk of it being shared further, so we nuked it from our Twitter feed. (Thankfully, we never shared it anywhere else.)
Because this sort of error is new ground for us, we’re not sure if this was the right move. We believe it is, but it isn’t easy to know if a different course may have been better.
However, it is easy to know that we must do our best to make it right. We have reached out to Hohn and offered our sincere apologies, asking him to forgive us for our sin against him. Second, we’re pinning this post to all our social media feeds for the next month so that it will come before every article, even sites where it never appeared. Third, though we’ve deleted the post, if anyone wants to know what it said in more detail and with greater specificity, they can email us at editor@protestia.com and we’ll make a summary available to them. Lastly, if any of the mentioned parties want to see it, we will make it available to them in full.
It’s not enough to undo the damage, but it reflects our editorial commitments as best as we can, along with our sincere desire to be as open and honest with our friends and foes alike.
Again, we’re sorry.
Dustin & David
Yes, this was egegrious. Cancelling my (free so no big deal to most folks) subscription egegrious. I am very opposed to this kind of reporting elsewhere and have simply stopped receiving info from those sources. I would have probably, with prayer, done the same upon seeing this error except for the way it was handled. I think you did rightly in your efforts to correct. Grace Church has received too much garbage by rags I won't mention but they are strong in Christ & can handle the foolishness of this world. I don't know the man you sinned against, but I hope he was as strong in the faith, Lord willing. Please be more careful in the future, I've come to rely on you for news, even though I'm not happy with your militant or sarcastic way of presenting it sometimes, but I will not hesitate to ask our Father to direct me elsewhere if this happens again. I hold you, as does your Savior, to a very high standard - one I too fail at far, far too often - and will hold you in my prayers. God bless and increase according to His will.