“Although you have been regularly claiming for years in your column that the ED editorial desk has a whole-hearted policy for rectifying errors in place, the actual situation is proof to the contrary,” is the reproach I received from a reader from Eindhoven.
The reader believed he saw a trend he did not like and which he believed is inappropriate for a quality newspaper. “It increasingly appears that the editorial desk ignores errors and only discloses them through the publication of letters by readers,” was his comment.
He illustrated his claim with an incorrect caption under a picture in the newspaper from Wednesday of last week. It was a photograph of the liberation taken on September 18, 1944, with the caption describing that it was related to U.S. tanks riding in the “Rechtestraat” street.
A number of readers called the editorial desk that Wednesday morning (one of them being the angry man from Eindhoven) saying that the tanks were not American but British.
For a newspaper from Eindhoven, the lack of historic knowledge is quite embarrassing, and such an “error” should be categorized as a blunder, was the immediate opinion that morning. “Tanks with caterpillar wheels dropped from planes with parachutes?” Indeed, on September 18, the English entered the city coming from Valkenswaard; the Americans landed with parachutes north of Eindhoven.
The error was not, as expected, rectified the next day. One day later however, a reader’s letter was published on the subject of the error, with the photograph in question as illustration, and the caption that the tanks were not American, but British.
I am not going to change my opinion that the policy of correcting errors is and will continue to be wholehearted, but the man from Eindhoven made his point. The issue around the tanks, without a doubt, should have been rectified the next day. However, I totally dispute the suggestion that the readers’ letters are being used as a disguised rectification column. The same applies to this column.
However, I must correct a second issue in the caption of the same photograph. The street the British tanks rode through was not the Rechtestraat, but the Stratumseind. Subscriber Hoppenbrouwers made the effort to visit the newspaper and tell this to the editors. He knows it for sure, because the part of the Stratumseind visible in the picture shows the house where he was living.
For the readers who remember: it was Hoppenbrouwers’ drug store. This photograph of the liberation from the electronic archives will definitely be published again in the future, but with a caption with correct information.
