I’m sorry, so sorry
Please accept my apology
Pop tune, 1960, sung by Brenda Lee
As many know, the perfect newspaper has yet to hit the streets. Goodness knows, folks at The Star have worked hard for 110 years, seeking to invent and patent just such a lustrous thing.
Yet flaws persist, even as the paper marks a proud milestone and younger brains hatch bold plans for a brighter future.
Not just flaws, mind you. Mistakes, glitches, boners, goofs, boo-boos, blunders and bloopers also happen, in defiance of puny human beings who put out the paper.
Hence the daily outpourings of corrections, clarifications and apologies crafted by the ombud, in exchange for bread to put on the family table.
Alas, after nine years of this work, it seems safe to predict that the job of correction-writer, an obscure subtrade in journalism, is here to stay.
An anecdote about the paper’s first successful publisher, Joseph E. Atkinson, in former Star editor J.H. Cranston’s engaging memoir, Ink On My Fingers, hints at the paper’s approach to fixing mistakes.
As a schoolboy, Atkinson was hampered by a stammer that rendered him mute in moments of stress.
One day, when a new teacher asked Atkinson to read aloud, the boy was unable to get a word out.
“Interpreting silence as disobedience, the new master started to thrash him,” Cranston writes. But when other kids in the class told the teacher about the stammer, the teacher apologized.
“That incident, J.E. Atkinson used to say, taught him two of the basic principles of journalism: First, be sure of your facts; and second, never be ashamed to admit a mistake,” Cranston noted.
I have no idea when The Star began to run formal corrections (as opposed to acknowledging mistakes by inserting corrective material into later stories).
As a smarty-pants editor advised the other day, “I trust you’re going back to the dawn of formal corrections, prior to which they were just called follow-up stories.”
But in The Star’s library, Ruth Brown, that day winding up a 40-year career at the paper, unearthed a trove of printed corrections and libel coverage dating back to 1924.
The earliest item in the four orange file folders dealt with a libel case from which The Star had emerged victorious. It was billed as the paper’s first libel trial in 25 years.
A Sept. 23, 1924 editorial that surely would have passed before the eyes of publisher Atkinson certainly welcomed the judge’s verdict. But it saw no reason for gloating.
“No newspaper, particularly if it is alert and keen to print the things that are interesting, can be published every day for 25 years amidst the haste and pressure of modern newspaper conditions and not make mistakes,” it said. “This paper, no doubt, has fallen into its share of error.”
The paper promised to continue meeting complaints “in a spirit of fairness and sympathy, having in mind the principle that where wrong is done, it ought to be righted.”
Two months later, The Star published a picture of Rev. F.E. Powell under the headline: “An Apology to Mr. Powell.”
The apology didn’t specify what egregious things The Star had said about Powell. But The Star acknowledged it had done “a grave injustice” by publishing statements about him that “we realize were unjust and without foundation.”
In the 1920s, I found one corrective story acknowledging an “unfortunate transposition” in an earlier report. Indeed, a Star reporter had turned an assault victim, one Alfred E. Steane, into an accused aggressor.
Not only did The Star say sorry, it published a lengthy letter from Steane’s lawyers threatening a libel suit against the paper.
On Jan. 29, 1925, The paper said it “gladly” took the opportunity of “making absolutely clear the fact” that a popular local violinist, F.G.C. Denning, “was not the person by the name of Denning who was fined $200 and costs in police court yesterday in connection with a liquor case.”
One can only guess at the kerfuffle later that year when the paper apologized for inconveniencing one Albert Lock, who, as the correction headline admitted, “HAD NO LADY WITH HIM WHILE DRIVING MOTOR.”
Whatever.
On one occasion, a published letter to the editor denouncing Ontario premier George Howard Ferguson was discovered to have been “an ingenious fraud upon The Star … the motive of which is not entirely clear.”
On another, the paper had accepted “erroneous” information in good faith “from the Pacific and Atlantic photograph service.” “FORMER NEBRASKA BEAUTY NOT CO-RESPONDENT IN DIVORCE SUIT,” a headline said.
In those days, some fixes seemed counterproductive. Consider one that ran under a quadruple headline:
“GEORGE CLEARY’S ILLNESS WAS NOT DUE TO ALCOHOL; Statements in Reports of Illness During New Year’s Celebration Are Erroneous; HAD CONVULSIONS; These Due to Other Causes Apology Tendered by The Star.”
On March 3, 1934, famed reporter Gordon Sinclair was forced to eat a lengthy Page 1 apology for an article about George Vanderbilt (yes, one of those Vanderbilts), who reportedly had boasted of trolling for African lions with ropes and shark hooks baited with zebra meat.
The headline had said: “Vanderbilt catches lions on hook from speedy car; King of Beasts Getting Sissified, Millionaire Game Hunter Claims.”
With humane societies up in arms and a major stink rising in the British House of Lords, several suspended game preserve guides and the Vanderbilts sued for libel.
“DIDN’T CATCH LIONS WITH SHARK HOOKS,” grovelled The Star. “Geo. Vanderbilt Dragged Meat on Ropes behind Motor.”
Unusual among retractions, this one tried to mollify Sinclair (who claimed his story was true) with faint praise. “This was his first mistake, committed while he was reeling from malarial fever,” it said.
Much later, in his memoirs, Sinclair denied he’d been sick, and even had a witness to back up his story. “Legal advice had pushed me out of the way to settle out of court because it was probably cheaper that way.”
Sometimes, it isn’t what the paper reported but what was omitted.
In 1935, according to a story told a decade ago by veteran reporter Jim Foster, the paper “proudly ran a series of inspirational columns by Canada’s best-known bank robber,” Norman (Red) Ryan.
A trigger-happy thug for 29 years, Ryan had just been paroled after serving 11 years of a 30-year sentence, with the blessing of prime minister R.B. Bennett.
The ghostwritten, crime-doesn’t-pay articles earned Ryan the title of “model ex-convict.” He was a guest of honour at a Toronto police field day.
But Ryan didn’t walk the talk.
Between speaking engagements, he almost certainly killed a Stouffville man to steal a getaway car. Within 10 months of his release, he shot a police officer during a Sarnia liquor store robbery, and died with a police bullet in his brain.
The Star’s coverage was wall to wall. It stressed how skilfully Ryan had tricked everyone. No story mentioned his literary debut in The Star.
In a 1941 dustup, a “non-correction” in the paper summarily dismissed a complaint from Conservative politician Arthur Meighen, who said The Star had misquoted him.
“The reporter, one of the most reliable in newspaper work in the city, was so struck with the sentence that when Mr. Meighen had finished his address he went up to him and read to him the sentence in the exact words in which he had taken it down … ”
Case closed.
On April 7, 1955, readers of this newspaper learned that The Star had apologized to Soviet defector Igor Gouzenko for a story that said he’d squandered $100,000 and would say “anything for money.”
“The Toronto Star wishes him continued success in the future,” the retraction said, noting the Gouzenko story had been both untrue and unfair to a good Canadian citizen.
Around 1960, the old scrapbooks begin to include fix-up notices published with a formal Correction label.
“Was Not Divorced By Wife,” said a headline in 1961, when divorce in Canada was still a blame game. The correction noted the gent was the plaintiff, not the defendant.
Also that year, a correction noted that carrying charges for a washing machine at Mel Lastman’s Bad Boy Store were $31, not $51 as a columnist had reported.
The paper’s relationship with Gouzenko was as rocky as ever in 1963, when a correction concluded:
“Mr. Gouzenko is not a rogue, or a defected spy in any sense that suggests criticism and The Star apologizes for any embarrassment this description may have caused him.”
The Star’s struggle for credibility was much aided by former publisher Beland H. Honderich, who wanted the paper to be more accountable and listen harder to readers.
He added flesh to Atkinson’s belief in the importance of ‘fessing up. In 1972, Honderich was instrumental in setting up the Bureau of Accuracy and appointing Canada’s first news ombudsman to run it.
The same year, he spearheaded creation of the Ontario Press Council, which adjudicates complaints against member papers, at arm’s length from their proprietors.
Both institutions turned 30 this year. Whatever their merits as contributors to accountability, neither has stopped the tide of mistakes.
Corrections today still speak to human fallibility, albeit it in a tongue more terse than the flowery circumlocutions of decades past.
They are intriguing little warts exposed in the paper, sometimes raising more questions than they answer.
“Actors did not smoke marijuana,” averred a Feb. 17, 1984 correction headline. Said actors had “simulated the smoking of marijuana and were, according to the theatre, actually smoking strawberry tea.
“The Star has no reason to believe the actors smoked marijuana and apologizes for any embarrassment its report may have caused them.”
Uh, huh.
One of the more remarkable hoaxes in the paper’s history unfolded and unravelled in 1985, two weeks after a bad tornado hit Barrie.
No photos of the twister surfaced until a Barrie woman phoned The Star to say her teenaged son had caught it on film.
Editors swallowed it whole.
The photo ran on Page 1 with a story about the remarkable young lensman. But callers flooded the paper with news that it was an Associated Press shot of an Ohio tornado.
The boy had copied the picture from the Barrie Examiner, using a camera he’d bought with earnings from his Star paper route. He confessed he’d been trying to buy a bike and help his mom, who was out of work. (She wasn’t in on the con.)
“Tornado picture: Sorry but we goofed,” said a front-page headline the next day. Then-managing editor Ray Timson let the boy keep his $300. “He’s just a kid,” Timson said. “We should have known better.”
We always should know better. It’s unlikely we ever will.
