Still, critics suggest Gore fabricated the situation at Sarasota High by cynically using "has to stand" instead of "had to stand" to create a false impression about dire overcrowding at a wealthy school. "In fact, Kaylie [sic] Ellis isn't still standing at Sarasota High School," points out this week's Time magazine.

Yet here's what Sarasota Herald-Tribune reporter Barton, who tells Salon she and her editors have been surprised and frustrated by the "complete misinformation" the press has spread about the overcrowding anecdote, found during a follow-up article about Sarasota High School that ran Thursday.

"Darci Bovier, 14, a freshman, said she had as many as 60 students in her life management skills class, and three out of 40 students didn't have desks in her Latin class.

Tenth-grader Jordan Zimmer said she had three people standing at the beginning of the school year in one of her classes. They didn't get desks until after the first month of school, the 15-year-old said.

Jennifer Kohl, 16, said, "The first week in American history class myself and two other students had no desks."

They sat in chairs placed in the aisle and used their laps to balance notebooks when they had to write something, she said.

Ryan Eastmoore, a 10th-grader who had the same science teacher as Kailey Ellis, said, "We had two kids standing up for the first month of school."

Cody Best, 14, a freshman, said two girls in his science class are sitting at a table and not at desks. Katherine Izenour, 15, a freshman, said, "I was standing for two weeks; I have a seat now."

And on and on it goes. It's all there in the pages of the Sarasota Herald-Tribune, which has been reporting for weeks on the lasting impact of a dramatic budget cut: high school classrooms often teeming with 40 students and kids going without desks for weeks on end. It all raises serious doubts about principal Kennedy's claim made in the wake of the debate that "We really do not have any students standing in class. We have more desks than we have students actually."

Yet for seven days almost nobody in the national press bothered to lay out those facts. CNN correspondent Brooks Jackson came the closest last week; the Washington Post revisited the issue Monday.

For the Bush camp to suggest Gore fabricated the Sarasota school crisis was probably good politics. For the press to accept it as fact was just bad journalism.

Recent Stories