Stop calling Don Blankenship a felon

However, I made an error when I referred to the failed GOP candidate as a “convicted felon.” This is a falsehood, which my editors dutifully corrected.

Blankenship has only ever been found guilty of a misdemeanor charge stemming from his role in the 2010 Upper Big Branch Mine disaster, which claimed the lives of 29 miners.

He was charged with felony conspiracy, but that didn’t pan out in court. Prosecutors were only able to get the misdemeanor charge through, for which he was found guilty on December 3, 2015. Blankenship was sentenced in 2016 to only one year in prison. He was also fined $250,000. On May 10, 2017, he was a free man.

There’s a lot to say about his culpability in the Big Branch Mine disaster, and there’s even more to say about whether it was an injustice that he was sentenced to only one year. The point, however, is that is factually inaccurate to call him a “convicted felon.” Because he isn’t.

Here’s the thing though: After my original article was corrected, I went back Thursday to figure out where I went wrong. As it turns out, I’m not the only one who has made this mistake. It looks like I am just part of a larger, inaccurate narrative being pushed by media. But hey – at least it means I’m not crazy. I didn’t straight-up imagine reading that Blankenship is a felon [emphases added]:

“[I]n an increasingly bitter fight between Jenkins and Morrisey, the convicted felon may yet have a chance,” The Guardian reported Monday.

MarketWatch published a report on Tuesday that read, “The three-person Republican race remained too close to call at this hour but ex-coal mining executive, and ex-felon, Don Blankenship was trailing in third place.”

“The Republican Party dodged a huge bullet on Tuesday night, as former coal baron and convicted felon Don Blankenship finished a distant third in the Republican primary for U.S. Senate in West Virginia,” Splinter News reported that same day.

Esquire’s Charles P. Pierce wrote Wednesday, “Over the past two or three weeks, the elite political media pleasured itself with the possibility that coal felon Don Blankenship would win the Republican primary for the U.S. Senate in West Virginia, thereby allowing said media simply to recycle everything they wrote last December about Roy Moore, the Gadsden Mall Creeper, down there in Alabama.”

It goes on like that for a bit, and we haven’t even touched on Twitter:

Blankenship is not a convicted felon. It’s unclear where this narrative first originated, but it’s just not true. Sorry for claiming otherwise this week.

I am become fake news, destroyer of worlds.