A man’s reputation is as valuable to him as it is fragile, just ask David C. Wiesner.
Mr. Wiesner, who lives on County Road in Bourne, has the misfortune of having a name very similar to David L. Wisner, a frequent flyer in the Bourne Police Logs.
Mr. Wisner was arrested earlier this month after he allegedly discharged an AK-47 during an argument with his neighbor over the whereabouts of his vehicle. Police said he then ran off to his mom’s house and hid in fear that he had actually killed the guy.
Mr. Wiesner is retired, and according to him, has a clean criminal record. He spent a career working in law enforcement, he said. His father was a game warden and “very involved in conservation issues.” There’s only one Wiesner family with roots in Bourne, he said, and since 2000 David L. Wisner’s actions have been throwing mud all over that name. Nearly a decade ago, Mr. Wiesner said, he received notification that “he” owed more than $26,000 in unpaid child support. The mail, meant for Mr. Wisner, was accidentally sent to him instead. “It took about three months and a hundred dollars to get the documents I needed to prove I wasn’t him,” Mr. Wiesner said.
Mr. Wiesner’s friends won’t talk to him anymore, old fishing buddies won’t return his calls and his step-son was briefly under the impression that he shot an AK-47 at somebody in a dispute over a freaking car. They think he’s a criminal. It says so in the paper.
So, what does that have to do with me? The report handed to me by the Police Department two weeks ago misspelled Mr. Wisner’s name as Wisener. Now, that’s nobody’s name, but it’s close enough to Wiesner for discomfort. I make mistakes sometimes, it’s a painful part of the job that I try not to lose sleep over. However, when things go haywire over something we’ve written in the paper, and it’s not our fault, I find myself getting even more frustrated.
It shows that, even when we as reporters are on the top of our game, the things we print will cause collateral damage. That’s the power of misinformation.
The views and opinions in the Enterprise blogs are those of the author and are not neccessarily shared by Falmouth Publishing.
I feel your pain…for a while there were three guys in Mashpee with identical names, save for their different middle initials. One of them was a major troublemaker, the other minor, the third a law-abiding citizen. I can only imagine what sort of grief the first two chuckleheads brought their innocent namesake.