Counting McMansions: an editor’s frustration

We took longer than we would have liked with a post by our newest team member, Diane Sweet; copy editing found an inconsistency in the number of houses that we needed to resolve before publication. In the end we agreed upon an excerpted quote that said presidential candidate John McCain had nine homes.

Um, maybe. It’s very easy to see why the inconsistency occurred. It seems that the number of properties owned by John and his spouse is still not clear; some reports say ten, as Diane’s article originally did, while others say 12, but may or may not include properties that are jointly or separately owned by the couple’s children. Other reports use numbers somewhere in between those figures, depending on their source. (And don’t get us started on whether they are single properties with multiple dwellings.)

The Obama campaign settled on seven, as you can see in the campaign ad video.

But what’s the real number? As managing editor of a tiny independent news outlet, I can’t muster the resources to get a definitive answer. And if mainstream media outlets with greater resources can’t clarify the number, how do average citizens vet this information themselves?

Hence my frustration as an editor; I wish I could tell you the unvarnished, completely accurate truth, and give you with reasonable certainty the real number of residential properties the McCains own. I’ll bet a lot of other editors across the country share the same frustration. You’ll probably continue to see some fuzzy reporting on this issue for the same reason, because there’s really only one source for the answer.

And that source says he’ll have to get his staff to tell us all.

We’ll be waiting.