Mark Powell’s War on Error

Brock wrote back via e-mail, asking Powell to "take a deep breath and listen," noting that Powell's conduct was hurting his cause. "My own assessment—after hearing from you so far—is that you are undercutting yourself," said Brock.

On Aug. 25, Powell responded: "It may not make you tremble, but with more editors in both America and Canada now asking me for diverse episodes from my trail, you can bet I'll be showing some clip including this sorry little episode about my first glances at the New York Times. In fact, I think the three for three start, and your attitude in reply as soon as it was clear that I really did back up my words, will be a useful vignette."

Powell also asked Brock to acknowledge the errors that Powell said he had found. Brock has neither replied nor corrected the reviews Powell feels are flawed.

"They're so goddamn arrogant," Powell says of the Times. "They just can't get their minds around the fact that there's somebody out there who's violently, drastically better at [copy editing than they are]." Neither the Post nor the Times returned SW's calls inviting them to respond to Powell's assertions.

In his "War on Error," as he calls it, Powell has found an ally in Richard J. Roth, Senior Associate Dean of the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University. In a letter of recommendation concerning Powell, Roth writes: "Mark Powell has a gift. He sees things that others, who should see them, cannot see."

Powell touted this "gift" in his Aug. 2 voicemail to the P-I's Drosendahl: "I think it would be appropriate to note to the editors, along with what you have recently, that I still do this just at a glance. Because people like that don't know me, haven't talked to me. Even when they read Roth's letter, they ask how does he do this? Well, I don't know. I just see it."

Seventeen days later, after Drosendahl stopped responding to him, Powell's tone grew considerably sharper. "Shame on you," Powell told Drosendahl in another voicemail. "If you want to simply deny the contribution that I've made and the time and effort that I've put in...I'm betting that I'll find executives up there who will agree that I've treated the P-I a lot better than it's treated me and that you just acted egregiously, considering that I just gave up paying work for the last few hours to give you examples of failure and decrepitude in your own paper. Shame on you; you can expect me to follow this up soon."

Two days later, Powell left Drosendahl yet another voicemail, which contained the following passage: "What I can prove is that your film reviewer has desperate accuracy and integrity problems. And I'm here to tell you that I'm going to expose that, if you do not fairly acknowledge the work that I have done for free."

In response, Jonathan Donnellan, general counsel for Hearst, wrote in a letter to Powell dated Aug. 25: "Your threats may be no more than an effort to intimidate Mr. Drosendahl, but they read like attempted blackmail and they will be dealt with as such if your conduct does not cease immediately."

Donnellan declined to comment any further, while Drosendahl would offer only the following: "[Mark is] a smart guy and he finds errors. However, there are other things about him that cause problems. I don't want to discuss it beyond that because I don't want to get in a mudslinging contest with him."

Powell denies trying to blackmail the P-I. "I told Glenn [Drosendahl] in a message, oh so clearly, that if he did not by Monday (last) issue a simple statement acknowledging my factual contribution to P-I accuracy and integrity, he should consider us in an adversarial relationship," Powell says in an e-mail to SW. However, in a separate e-mail to SW, Powell freely admits asking the P-I to give him the chance to write "a couple of film reviews" or to cut him a check in exchange for his "freelance editing services."

For a man as verbose as Powell, he's remarkably tight-lipped about his personal history. He acknowledges that he's almost 45 years old and his collar is blue, but won't expound on his occupation beyond that. He says he's worked as a copy editor for a major metropolitan newspaper, but won't say which one, only that it ended in "absolute disaster." Occasionally he'll get an op-ed published in a major metropolitan newspaper informing readers of various errors he's detected in the public realm. And his "War on Error" is an unpaid hobby, albeit a rather consuming one.

"I simply believe in it," says Powell. "Somebody has to expose the real condition of the media."

jfroehling@seattleweekly.com