Regret the Error

As I announced last week, all new content for this blog is now being published on the new Regret the Error blog at Poynter Online. Please bookmark the URL, or add the RSS feed. I will automatically shift the previous RSS feed to the new RSS address after this post, so no need to resubscribe if you have the old feed in your reader.

As a way of enticing you to head over to the new blog, I today published the 2011 edition of the Year in Media Errors and Corrections, my annual roundup of the best of the worst in journalistic error. Go over and read it, and let me know what you think!

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An article on Nov. 24 about the photographer Steven Klein misstated the year that the magazine Dutch published pictures showing men being brutally handcuffed by police. The photographs appeared in the May-June 2002 issue, not in 2003. The article also erroneously included an American actor among the men shown in the pictures. Dutch did not publish a picture of Brad Pitt ”kneeling and bare-chested, being brutally cuffed by the police.” (The magazine identified the men as Travis, Adam Durocher and Eric White.) Link

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A story in Wednesday’s Local & State section incorrectly stated that James Lambert, who was fatally shot Tuesday by an off-duty firefighter, had been convicted of taking indecent liberties with a child. Because of an error interpreting court records, the Observer wrongly attributed that conviction to Lambert. Instead, another man by the same name and age was convicted of the crime. Link

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In a story Dec. 14 about military sexual abuse, The Associated Press reported erroneously that an attorney representing military members and veterans said she was surprised by the dismissal of a lawsuit. Susan Burke said she was “not surprised.” Link

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Today at 2 pm Eastern you should join me, Reuters’ Jack Shafer and my fellow Poynter person Mallary Tenore as we chat about 2011′s biggest journalistic errors.

I’ve been working on my annual roundup of The Year in Media Errors and Corrections and have a bunch of candidates in mind. We’ll share the current finalists during the chat, and I hope folks will share others I may have overlooked.

Come have your say, and chat about some of the best of the worst. I’ll even share a few choice corrections!

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A map showing reported deaths in Syria since protests began at the beginning of the year contained some errors. The Golan Heights were located north of Damascus, some distance from the Israeli border. The city of Idlib appeared twice, once in its correct location and again near Hama. The same city, normally referred to in the Guardian as Qusayr, appeared twice under two variant spellings as Qusseir and Qusayer. The number of people killed in Sanamayn was given as 12.5 (Deaths in Syria by location, 10 December, page 31). Link

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An article on Thursday about a push to ban horse-drawn carriage rides in Central Park misstated part of the name of an organization to which an upstate New York veterinarian belongs, and it described the carriages incorrectly at one point. The veterinarian, Dr. Nena Winand, is a member of the American Association of Equine Practitioners, not the American Society of Equine Practitioners. And the carriages have four wheels, and therefore are not “hansom cabs,” which are two-wheeled. An accompanying picture caption, as well as a subheading in some editions, and a correction in this space on Friday repeated the error about the cabs. (A reader pointed out this inaccuracy in a letter published in The Times in 1985, but this is the first correction of numerous such references through the years.) Link

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A Dec. 10 placeline and article about Canadian Special Forces who travel the world training foreign militaries to fight terrorism incorrectly stated the location of a conference on the future of special operations as Kingston, Jamaica. In fact, the conference was in Kingston, Ont. Link

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A Nov. 27 article about holiday home tours incorrectly attributed a quote to Yitz Fleischman, owner of the Chanukah House. Fleischman did not compare a “talking” Hanukkah rebbe with talking to Santa.

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Thirty years ago, a cub reporter for the New York Times was given his first assignment: “to cover the failure of the old transmitter of Columbia University’s radio station, WKCR-FM, which was then perched on 515 Madison Avenue, at 53rd Street.”

David W. Dunlap was brought back to the memory of that first Times byline thanks to a recent interview about WKCR. He subsequently wrote a post for the Times City Room blog about his memory of that first story, and how it relates to recent news at the station. His post included a scan of the original 1981 story. As a result of that old story being resurfaced, Dunlap learned that he’d made two errors in his story. So he blogged about those, too:

Bad enough to discover, on revisiting the article, that I’d misstated the cross street at which the tower was situated. (I said it was 54th Street.)

Then came this e-mail: “I was Googling WKCR and found this article below. I had no idea that I was a part of your first article and that James Gleick was your editor! It was fun to know this after so many years. Michael Silberstein. P.S. It’s Silberstein, not Silverstein.”

Goes to show that it’s never too late for a reader — or long lost source — to help you fix some errors.

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The common problem with fact-checking is a misplaced reverence for “expertise” as a substitute for hard-nosed reporting and independent evaluation. So here are a few friendly suggestions for better fact-checking: Reporters do not represent the establishment, they should be suspicious of it; politicians who seem reasonable may not be; politicians who depart from the Washington consensus may be saying something important. If you think you can even get to the truth of a complex, contentious issue with a couple of phone calls, you are kidding yourself and your readers. And don’t invent a “truth” where the truth is genuinely in dispute.

— via “How to Fix Fact-Checking”, a post on Forbes by John McQuaid. It comes in response to a recent piece by Mark Hemingway in the Weekly Standard, “Lies, Damned Lies, and ‘Fact Checking’”.

An excerpt from the Standard piece, which had the subhead “The liberal media’s latest attempt to control the discourse”:

The media establishment has largely rallied round the self-satisfied consensus that fact checking is a noble pursuit. Nonetheless there are signs of an impending crack-up. In their rush to hop on the fact-checking bandwagon, the media appear to have given little thought to what their new obsession says about how well or poorly they perform their jobs.

It’s impossible for the media to fact check without rendering judgment on their own failures. Seeing the words “fact check” in a headline plants the idea in the reader’s mind that it’s something out of the ordinary for journalists to check facts. Shouldn’t that be an everyday part of their jobs that goes without saying? And if they aren’t normally checking facts, what exactly is it that they’re doing?

As such, fact checking frequently involves one news organization publicly accusing competing organizations of malpractice. Instead of newsroom watercooler kvetching and burying subtle digs in the eleventh paragraph, friendly fire is breaking out into the open.

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In a Dec. 11 story, The Associated Press erroneously quoted President Obama as saying: “There are going to be people who say, `This is the socialist Obama and he’s come out of the closet.’” That remark was made by 60 Minutes correspondent Steve Kroft, not the president. Link

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Earlier today, this correction was added to the online version of the explosive Guardian article that helped push phone hacking back into the news, and ultimately sink the News of the World:

An article about the investigation into the abduction and death of Milly Dowler (News of the World hacked Milly Dowler’s phone during police hunt, 5 July, page 1) stated that voicemail “messages were deleted by [NoW] journalists in the first few days after Milly’s disappearance in order to free up space for more messages. As a result friends and relatives of Milly concluded wrongly that she might still be alive.” Since this story was published new evidence – as reported in the Guardian of 10 December – has led the Metropolitan police to believe that this was unlikely to have been correct and that while the News of the World hacked Milly Dowler’s phone the newspaper is unlikely to have been responsible for the deletion of a set of voicemails from the phone that caused her parents to have false hopes that she was alive, according to a Metropolitan police statement made to the Leveson inquiry on 12 December.

Even with the correction appended, one of the subheads on the story still reads, “Deleted voicemails gave family false hope”. That seems to implicate the NoW. The Guardian has been criticized for this routine correction to a major allegation. Storyful has a look at some reaction from former NoW journalists.

Writing in the Independent, Stephen Glover offered this assessment:

Some people might think The Guardian owes us a more comprehensive apology than a brief posting at the top of an online article published five months ago. But the paper’s editor, Alan Rusbridger, does not like apologising since to do so would suggest that, even though he inhabits the upper reaches of Mount Olympus, he is made of flesh and blood like the rest of us. He did carry a story in Saturday’s paper under the headline “Police logs raise questions over the deletion of Dowler voicemails”, but it did not contain the blunt admission of error conveyed by the posting, far less an apology. Ironically, it was co-written by Nick Davies, one of the co-authors of the 4 July article.

Thanks, Norman!

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A little over a week ago, I wrote my final weekly column for Columbia Journalism Review. At the end of that column, I said I was ending my CJR column because I would be “taking my work to a new home soon as part of a larger announcement regarding my site, Regret the Error.” I’m very happy to now be able to share the details of that announcement.

The headline is I’ve joined the Poynter Institute as a member of its adjunct faculty, and this blog will be moving to Poynter.org. This is the culmination of a discussion between Poynter and me that started back in August.

I’m tremendously excited about this because, for the first time, it means I can spend the majority of my time writing for Regret the Error (and the other great blogs at Poynter.org), while also developing training programs focused on accuracy and verification, and contributing in other ways to the Institute’s work. I’ll continue to focus on accuracy, errors, verification, misinformation, and related topics such as transparency and accountability in the press.

One of the frustrations I’ve had with running this site is it’s never been more than a sideline. My day job has always been elsewhere, meaning I couldn’t jump on news quickly, or devote time to longer, reported pieces. I’ll now be able to do that, and a lot more, too. One of the best parts? The vast majority of the work I produce is going to be available free of charge. And that work will be produced in conjunction with the great and knowledgeable people at Poynter.

In terms of the nuts and bolts, my agreement with Poynter means this site’s archives will be imported into Poynter.org for the duration of our relationship. (This initial agreement runs until the end of 2012.) That change, and the redirection of the URL, will happen in the new year. But as of Monday, December 19, all new Regret the Error posts will be found at Poynter.org/category/latest-news/regret-the-error/. My RSS feed will move there as of the 19th, so no need to reset your subscription.

Apart from that, I will continue to be involved with OpenFile, the Canadian online news startup I helped launch in 2010. I am shifting to an editorial advisory role from my current position. I advise another Canadian news startup, Spundge. It’s in private beta and is building tools to enable journalists to discover and manage real-time news and information. I help with product development as the company’s journalist in residence. I also write a weekly column for the Toronto Star. (It highlights the week’s most notable media mistake.)

I will continue to disclose these relationships when writing or commenting about related topics or issues, and I will work to avoid any conflicts of interest. I will always err on the side of disclosure.

Finally, I want to thank all of you who have read this site over the years, and those of you who send in corrections and errors. I value your contributions and attention, and my promise is that these changes will provide you with the best content you’ve ever seen on this blog.

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Stephen Harper is prime minister of Canada. In some editions Thursday, the front-page World-Wide news summary incorrectly referred to him as the country’s premier. Link

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A Nov. 7 article about the power of the Punjabi press mistakenly said that a “slew” of Punjabi newspapers published a story whipping up public sentiment against a 23-year-old bride whose husband accused her of only marrying him to come to Canada. In fact, only a few Punjabi weekly papers reported this and neither of the two Greater Toronto area Punjabi daily papers did so. Link

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An apology from the Express Tribune of Pakistan:

We regret the inadvertent publication of the article titled “Shia-Sunni reconciliation” by Saleem Ali in our print edition of December 9, 2011 and subsequently on our website.
The article was published without exercising proper editorial judgment. We apologise for the mistake and to our readers whose religious sentiments were hurt. We will not be taking any more articles from this writer. The article has been removed from the website Link

The same apology appeared on Pakistan News Today. Here’s where the offending article originally appeared. It’s now a 404 page, though Google news has this excerpt:

For example, Maulana Ishaq’s sermons on Shia-Sunni unity (given in Urdu), which have hundreds of thousands of hits on YouTube, are heartening. They discourage Shias from hurling abuse but also admonish Sunnis from being emotional about respect and …

I contacted Saleem Ali, the author, for additional details and he said he objects to the removal of the piece. Ali is a professor of environmental studies at the University of Vermont. From his email reply to me:

This was a case of being bullied by some religious zealots who kept calling any criticism of ritual “hate speech.”
While some language was insensitive and i apologized for that — it was by no means “hate speech.” I dont approve of their decision to remove but can understand it in Pakistan’s tough media environment.
You will note the comments under the retraction that majority of readers did not think it should be removed.
I reposted the article on my blog — with an image to show the kind of ritual I was criticizing and also a preface with context and apology for the particular word usage.

He offered additional detail on his blog, writing that the piece “was a test of free speech in Pakistan and it is clear that the country is still stuck in a time warp of religious hypersensitivity.” Also from his post (emphasis his):

In the rush to write we can all be sometimes negligent and I recognize that the choice of words in describing some of the rituals was insensitive but certainly not hateful. To show due respect and in a spirit of amity I have removed the language which described the state of the mourners in the procession as “high on testosterone” (and God knows what else).” In retrospect this was indeed an inappropriate statement and I apologize unconditionally for use of that statement.

Ali told me via email that “this became an issue of personal safety as well.” He said he was subject to verbal attacks on Twitter, had his Wikipedia page vandalized, and that some people wrote letters to the president of his university to try to get Ali fired.

“The university of course realized that these accusations were baseless and actually offered me police protection (not that I need it in Vermont!),” he said. “However, given the high rates of kidnappings of writers in Pakistan such bullying and defamation is a serious issue. I have family in Pakistan and this has caused us sleepless nights for the past few days.”

Update Deceber 13, 2011: Ali also wrote about the incident for the website of Foreign Policy.

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Last Sunday’s article ‘Kate’s crimpers go to war’ may have left the impression that Richard Ward, proprietor of the Richard Ward Hair & Metrospa salon in Chelsea, was jealous of James Pryce, a former employee, who styled the Duchess of Cambridge’s hair on the day of the Royal Wedding. The article might also have suggested that Mr Ward was trying to capitalise on the salon’s Royal links. We accept that Mr Ward has always given full credit to Mr Pryce for his work and that Mr Ward behaved in a totally proper manner with regard to any publicity before the Royal Wedding. We apologise for any embarrassment caused. Link

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CMU professor Kiron Skinner, recently named to GOP presidential candidate and former House speaker Newt Gingrich’s national security team, says she was misquoted in a story Monday about her appointment. She said her quote was: “I’ve been a supporter of Speaker Gingrich for a long time because I’ve seen him in numerous professional circumstances…” The published quote was “… numerous unprofessional circumstances …” Link

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ON December 6 under the headline Xmas dinner Is On pounds 1m Lotto Win Coach, we wrongly reported that Mr Paul Trainor (right) had won a pounds 1million Lottery prize. In fact the prize was won by another person.
Mr Trainor does not work at the Belfast Health and Social Care Trust, nor did he buy a turkey-dinner for work colleagues or say the he was going to buy a new car. We are happy to correct the position and apologise to Mr Trainor for any embarrassment or confusion caused as a result.

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After Caolan Mulrooney, a 19 year-old student in Cork, Ireland, went missing after a night out with friends, the community rallied together to look for him. The search was still on this past Sunday when the Irish Mail on Sunday reported that Mulrooney had been found dead.

In fact, his body wasn’t found until a couple of days later. The Mail story said Mulrooney had been found in the River Lee. In reality, he was found in a yard belonging to a business. The paper also hinted at suicide, but that doesn’t appear to have been a factor.

What an outrageous, unconscionable mess.

As as result of the false report, the president of the school’s student union sent a letter to the paper demanding an apology. And the Student council banned sales of the paper on campus. Now that an apology has been published, the ban will be revisited when the council meets int he new year. A report from IrishCentral.com:

The motion to ban ‘the Mail’ was passed after students promised to seek some measure of reprisal for the tabloid having deliberately invented the story in a callous and calculated bid to merely sell more copies.
An apology was printed in the newspaper yesterday, and a marketing manager for the paper’s parent company said that the editor had personally travelled to Cork to meet with members of Caolan’s family to express his sorrow at the pieces publication.

Here’s the apology, via the University Times:

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Footnote: Last week’s column revealed that I was the third born of the four Abraham children, which was news to my brothers and sister. For the record, I was the second born. Link

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“Empire Strikes Backstraat” isn’t the name of an actual street in Almere, the Netherlands. An earlier version of this article incorrectly said the town had a street with that name. Link (sub req’d)

Thanks, Niels!

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Our article, “The Acton Spring? How unrest in Syria spilled over into the respectable streets of West London” (4 November 2011) referred to a “classified 2008 cable from the then-US chargé d’affaires to Damascus released by Wikileaks this year”. The cable named Dr Fawaz Akhras as a suspected avenue used by the Syrian President Bashar al-Assad “to stash funds abroad”.
Dr Akhras is a respected consultant cardiologist who has lived in London for over 35 years. He categorically denies that he has ever held or transferred any funds for or on behalf of President al-Assad. We accept that Dr Akhras should have been given the opportunity to make his position clear before our article was published. Link

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Here’s a forthright and detailed apology from the editor of the Anniston Star:

A newspaper story dutifully crossing its “T’s” and dotting its “I’s” can be a powerful tool in a community, a force for tremendous good. When it gets key facts wrong, however, it can inflict tremendous harm.
In the case of one Tuesday story (“Sexual harassment case filed against Dad’s Bar-B-Que”), The Anniston Star got a major fact wrong. It incorrectly reported that the owner of Dad’s Bar-B-Que also owns the Top o’ the River restaurant. That is wrong. The owner of Anniston’s Top o’ the River is in no way affiliated with the restaurant that is currently the subject of an Equal Employment Opportunity Commission lawsuit.
The Star regrets the error and apologizes to Top o’ the River, its ownership and employees for this mistake.
The Star misinterpreted a state database of business ownership. The fault lies not with the database but with us. Once alerted to the error Tuesday morning, The Star amended its online version and began a twofold process: (a.) of digging into how this mistake occurred and (b.) of taking steps to ensure it is not repeated.
Errors of this magnitude happen occasionally at The Star, just as they do at most other newspapers. That does nothing to lessen the pain, regret and unpleasantness that accompany them; the mood in the newsroom Tuesday was decidedly downcast.
The newspaper is fully dedicated to delivering the news important to its community in a fair, honest and accurate manner. One such vital method is to report our errors and make corrections. Another way is to learn from our mistakes. Rest assured, we remain committed to earning the public’s trust daily.

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