RHOADES LESS TRAVELED:

You’ve heard of the so-called “blame America first” crowd.

Welcome to the blame the media first crew.

Actually, the blame the Daily Pilot gang.

Last week, we at the Pilot broke the story of two Newport Harbor High School girls arrested on suspicion of attacking another girl. A video of the beating was aired on YouTube and posted on MySpace.

This, apparently, is a trend, but that’s another column.

Prosecutors are deciding whether to try the two 14-year-olds as adults (do it, I say), and the girls also face possible expulsion from school.

Here’s where it gets tricky.

The victim was originally identified as developmentally disabled.

First off, she isn’t, and my sympathies go out to her and her family. The way I see it, she suffered through three traumas: 1) The beating; 2) The airing of the beating; 3) Being mislabeled as developmentally disabled.

Secondly, the Daily Pilot was unfairly scapegoated on score No. 3.

A Los Angeles Times story that reported that the victim was developmentally disabled first appeared in a local newspaper and was repeated in a letter to parents posted on the school’s website. In it, Newport Harbor Principal Michael Vossen described the victim as a “female special education student.”

The story went on to quote Newport-Mesa Unified School District spokeswoman Laura Boss as saying, “We got the information through the media, and it is in fact not true.”

Which is true.

Technically.

The district did get the news from a local paper. Namely, us.

What neither the Times story nor Boss — with whom I spoke and who I’m convinced did not set out to make us look bad — pointed out was that the Pilot got the information from the Newport Beach Police Department.

The story attributed, in the first paragraph, the “developmentally disabled” part to the police.

How the cops got it wrong is anyone’s guess. Information moves pretty fast these days and mistakes — often sired by misinterpretations — get made.

But this one didn’t originate with the Pilot, which is my roundabout way of saying: Don’t shoot the messenger.

BRADY RHOADES is the Daily Pilot’s managing editor. He may be reached at brady.rhoades@latimes.com or at (714) 966-4607.