The Lantern published a story Friday titled “Organizations try to clean up graffiti,” which detailed problems and concerns local business owners thought graffiti caused. The owners said the vanadalism created by graffiti negatively impacted business sales and propery values. The Lantern also ran two photographs of a mural constructed by the community that honors the late Daymon Dodson, a popular music artist in the Columbus area.
The Lantern apologizes for linking a story about illegal vandalism and a picture of a mural that honored a respected figure in the Columbus community and was permitted by Tuttle Park and Columbus Division of Police. Although none of captions or story directly mentioned the mural as vandalism, we created a link that should not have been made.
According to several letters written to the staff writer, the Tuttle Park mural of Dodson was created with good intentions and out of rememberance. The Lantern in no way meant to disrespect Dodson and apologizes to his friends, family and to our readers for the harm caused.
A photograph should have been taken of the troublesome graffiti that the article mentioned. We did not do our research for the photograph and we misrepresented an act of rememberance as an act of vandalism. Again, we apologize to the Columbus community for the misrepresenation of a good-natured homage to a respected Columbus figure.
