As errors go, this one was pretty obvious, and, besides, it wasn’t going to affect the course of civilization as we know it.
We had left out the word “million” in a story about state transportation spending and instead reported Gov. Sonny Perdue was rejecting former Gov. Roy Barnes’ plan for an $822 bond program.
Yet, three days went by and no one — not even some of our sharpest, eagle-eyed, “don’t-you-guys-have-proofreaders-anymore?” critics — called to say it needed correcting.
Then another reporter, working off an archived copy of the original story, picked up the same paragraph — mistake and all — and was about to include it in another story. Fortunately, this time the copy desk spotted it and made the fix. We published a correction on the original story the following day.
Which brings us back again, I’m afraid, to the Jayson Blair saga.
When The New York Times conducted its own investigation into how their discredited reporter was able to quote people he never met, put datelines on stories where he wasn’t and generally get away with dozens of factual errors, they found that often no one — not even the subjects of his stories — had complained about his inaccuracies.
A stunning example was in his story about POW Jessica Lynch’s West Virginia family homestead, which he inaccurately described as across from a tobacco field and surrounded by livestock. It was neither. Lynch’s family said they saw the report, joked about it among themselves, but never thought to call the Times to correct it.
In the wake of the Blair scandal, the Associated Press Managing Editors organization surveyed readers in 15 newspaper markets around the country, asking them why they wouldn’t alert editors to reporting they recognized as clearly inaccurate. In the non-scientific survey, readers said:
They doubted the newspapers cared when they made mistakes and probably wouldn’t listen to them anyway.
They thought the error was so obvious the newspaper would correct it on its own.
Navigating the paper’s corrections process would be cumbersome and take too much time.
Accuracy is not important in journalism because it might get in the way of hyping a story, which is seen as more important.
Newspapers can be impenetrable places. Tracking down reporters and editors to correct mistakes can be difficult.
That’s why a couple dozen or so major newspapers around the country employ public editors and ombudsmen to be available for readers to air issues of accuracy and fairness.
Those last two words are important in this discussion and make that last belief by readers — that we don’t want facts to stand in the way of a good story — all the more problematic.
As a practical matter, what I have found is that some readers call to question the accuracy of a story when in fact they are really concerned about whether the story is fair. There is a big difference.
A fact in a story could be erroneously reported but the story may still be scrupulously fair. Those errors are usually easily handled and fixed. When readers point them out, they seem happy to know we want to correct them.
But a story that is meticulously checked for accuracy can still be unfair. Dealing with whether a story was unfair by leaving out a relevant fact, or misinterpreting something that it reported accurately, is much more subjective. Readers with complaints along these lines aren’t always happy with the final outcome.
Yet the process is the same. It starts with a call or e-mail to the newspaper to lodge a complaint. And this office exists to make that easier. Complaints about fairness sometimes result in a correction or clarification, sometimes a letter to the editor, other times a follow-up story.
In correcting the record on mistakes, you are also helping us correct the archived copy of the stories we write. The correction is affixed to the top of the story in the archive, so that in the future other reporters using it for background do not repeat the error.
This process of public accountability is extremely important. It not only helps us reduce the errors that we make in the future, but also helps close the too-wide gap that unfortunately exists between readers and the newspaper.
