Ian Mayes could not resist. There he was in Paris last month, before an international gathering of fellow news ombudsmen at the august Academie Francaise, the institution devoted to preserving the purity of the French language. Speaking in English, his words simultaneously translated into French, the erudite ombudsman from The Guardian of London borrowed from Marcel Proust to make a point about using the language accurately.
Newspapers, he said, strive for meticulous accuracy but generally achieve the “meticulous inaccuracy” that Proust satirically applied to the work of the Goncourt brothers, famous French diarists.
Mayes, while speaking specifically about newspapers and language, captured the flaw common to all news media: Accuracy, or the lack of it, whether in the use of language or in the presentation of factual information. While no journalist is deliberately inaccurate, errors invariably slip into reporting.
Errors that are the most visible, however, are in newspapers. There is a written record of the mistake, and nothing can erase it. That is why newspapers publish corrections.
Errors occur with depressing frequency. They occur not only at newspapers in London and San Diego, but in Istanbul, Salt Lake City, Dublin, Honolulu, Tokyo, Cameroon, Los Angeles, Chicago, Toyko, Sao Paulo — in other words, at all newspapers. If editors at papers in those cities that have ombudsmen are anything like editors for The San Diego Union-Tribune (and I suspect they are), one of their goals is to reduce the number of errors.
While some readers may recognize that a newspaper is, as someone put it long ago, the “first rough draft of history,” they lose patience with what they perceive as sloppiness on the part of writers and editors. Some errors are made because of deadline pressures, but others occur because some journalists are just what readers think, sometimes sloppy. They are distracted, or they do not listen to their instincts about checking something one more time, they run out of time, or they think they remember something but their memory is faulty. When it comes to language, some errors are made because the writers do not know better.
How much of a problem are these mistakes? Should journalists dismiss complaints? I think not. Accuracy — the lack of it — is the number one complaint of readers, viewers and listeners, according to a survey of ombudsmen attending the Paris conference. Complaints are not only about the misuse of language, but factual errors, wrong historical dates, poor math, missing words, misspellings, poor grammar and missing context, according to Miriam Pepper, ombudsman for The Kansas City Star, who compiled the survey.
Mayes said he gets more mail from readers about the use and misuse of the language than any other topic. A collection of Mayes’ corrections and columns have been published in “The Guardian Corrections & Clarifications,” now in its second printing.
In the book, the witty Mayes includes some of his most humorous corrections as well as a number of columns on language. Unlike Mayes, I do not correct most typos that result in muddles. Perhaps, I should.
One of his corrections from April 22, 1999: “Homophone corner: The editor told us on page 17, April 17, that Qui Italia was an online magazine for ex-patriots.” And, on March 28, 2000: “The women’s a cappella group to which we intended to refer on page 13 of the Guide (North edition) March 25, under Liverpool-Merseyside Festival, is Soul Purpose, not Foul Purpose.”
Mayes also decried the changes in meaning and said they are brought about by ignorance. “The modern dictionary is a record of what we say rather than what we ought to say,” he said.
Some Union-Tribune readers will identify with his words. When I get complaints from readers about word usage, I go to the dictionary and usually find the meaning that was used. I find myself echoing reporters who tell me it is an accepted meaning, that meanings change as the language changes. That may be, but Mayes’ words are food for thought for those of us intent on preserving the language.
Robert Solé, ombudsman at Le Monde, the Paris daily, complained about neologisms and use of Americanisms that do not enrich “but impoverish the language.” He, too, fields complaints about errors, even though each story is proof-read by five editors, which is more than the standard at the Union-Tribune and most U.S. newspapers. In one instance, a reader found 40 typographical errors in one day.
If nothing else, the meeting in Paris showed that newspapers everywhere are facing the same challenges and that readers are concerned.
