We took our time before wading into the Everald Warmington brouhaha, for good reasons.

It was important to avoid making an emotional response to his rather crude description of the Jamaican news media as “filth”.

But more importantly, we did not want to rush into a knee-jerk reaction to his criticism of the media as an attack against press freedom.

Mr Warmington, like any other Jamaican, is entitled to criticise the work and performance of the media. We dish it out so we must be able to take it. This is the essence of the great truth of freedom of expression, which is very much alive in Jamaica.

Yesterday, the Gleaner demonstrated that the ‘system’ works, by an apology, even if it was a little bit over the top — with a photo of the editor-in-chief and all — over two erroneous news stories carried Sunday and Monday.

We believe the apology will restore the faith that readers would have lost after the wrong done to Mr Andrew Holness and Mrs Patricia Sinclair-McCalla, and reinforce the need for all of us journalists to cling to the watchwords ‘carefulness’ and ‘balance’.

We completely reject the rush-to-judgement suggestion that every error made by journalists has to do with political motive.

In our own case, we took the unprecedented step of criticising ourselves, along with the Sunday Herald, in an editorial titled “So what if politicians buy homes, health services overseas?” – October 5, 2010.

The point is that we are, none of us in media, above criticism. That is why we didn’t mind when Nationwide’s This Morning, as imperfect as they are themselves, called us out on the Roger Clarke story when we quoted an unnamed source and not Mr Clarke himself.

But that is as far as we are willing to let Mr Warmington off the hook. A cursory glance at his run-ins with the media shows that the South West St Catherine Member of Parliament is trying to get himself a few headlines. The trouble is that he blunders every time because he is so inept at it.

Mr Wamington is more about form than substance. Notice how he makes great ceremony out of telling a busy public servant to leave the Gordon House chambers and go put on a jacket. The man was wearing a tie and was not dishevelled.

The MP is the same man who embarrassed his Jamaica Labour Party (JLP), an active member of the Electoral Commission, which he accused of having its own “axe to grind” when he disagreed with its tripartite report on the realignment of constituency boundaries in March this year.

In August, he also called Contractor-General Greg Christie “overzealous” when he was being investigated in the award of contracts by the St Catherine Parish Council, to Strathairn Construction Company, which he was said to have owned.

These are in addition to several other outrageous outbursts made by Mr Wamington over the years. How he gets away with this behaviour defies the imagination. Does he have someone’s secret?

But then you, know, poor Mr Warmington, he has not a clue.