What should The Miami Herald do when it discovers that it was wrong in a front-page story accusing the mayor of Broward County of impropriety?

No, wait. That question is too easy. We all know that answer.

Here is a better one: What should The Herald do when the mayor went along with the key point of the accusation during the reporting?

That was the situation The Herald faced two Sundays ago after publishing a Page One story saying Mayor Stacy Ritter had voted in favor of a measure that could cost taxpayers millions but benefited a company for which her husband is a lobbyist.

The vote was recorded in the official minutes of the County Commission meeting and was never denied by Ritter in an interview. After the story ran, however, the mayor said a videotape of the meeting showed that she was not present during the vote. Herald editors and reporters then reviewed the tape and confirmed that the story was wrong.

Adding to interest in the story is that: No. 1, the company owns the Florida Panthers and the BankAtlantic Center; No. 2, the benefit for the company was a savings in insurance premiums of as much as $15 million a year; No. 3, taxpayers are now liable for up to $250 million should a hurricane wipe out the center.

What The Herald did after confirming the error was run a front-page retraction, in the same spot where the original story ran. That was the right thing to do. But there is more: An anatomy of what went wrong reveals a mix of normal human weaknesses, personal anguish, political repercussions -- and questions whose answers may lie hidden only in human hearts.

STEP BY STEP

The story begins with The Herald's Dan Christensen, a veteran reporter of some 30 years. He had written a front-page story last May about insurance shortages at the BankAtlanTic Center and saw the insurance item on the Commission agenda. He was responsible for covering the Commission and had no idea at the time, he says, that the mayor's husband, Russ Klenet, was a lobbyist in Tallahassee for the Arena Operating Company, which operates the arena. Christensen discovered the connection, but he had a critical problem: The mayor wouldn't talk to him.

She hasn't talked to him for a year and a half because of articles he wrote on similar conflicts of interest involving her husband. In those, Klenet's firm -- not Klenet directly -- represented a company that makes voting machines the county bought. Ritter got a state Ethics Commission opinion clearing her of any conflict of interest but felt, she told me, that Christensen unfairly continued to hammer on her marital connection.

Elected officials have personal lives and spouses like everyone else, but these can bring them more than the normal complications. Ritter said that she and her husband ''scrupulously'' review upcoming county contracts to ensure that she recuses herself from any that he is connected to.

Prosecutors cleared her last April of a trio of possible conflicts, but she felt that Christensen was combing through records to engage in ''gotcha'' journalism.

''Every single reporter, from the mainstream to the alternative media, is trying to find that a local government official is doing something wrong, or looks like he is doing something wrong,'' she said. ``Because my husband is a lobbyist, we are an easy target.''

Some distance between reporters and political leaders is healthy, but if the conflict is so deep that they don't talk, a fundamental problem arises. Some level of mutual trust is good.

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