Readers at the Raleigh News & Observer are still sending in letters about this erroneous AP story and resulting correction. This previous letter took the paper to task for taking nearly a week to publish the correction. Now this letter criticizes the paper for giving the correction minor placement (the initial story was played on the front page). Both criticisms are valid and the News & Observer is not alone in this. Other papers were guilty of one or both offenses in relation to this story. For example, the Seattle Times ran the initial AP story on March 2. Yet it only ran a correction on Monday the 13th.
Regarding your front page article March 2 stating that President Bush
had been told of possible levee breaches in advance of Katrina coming
ashore and your March 8 correction (stating a breach is a hole and what
was actually discussed was water overflowing the levees), I picked up
on one thing immediately. You deemed the negative story worthy of the
front page, but the correction was published on the second page in your
small "Corrections" column, which not everyone reads.Case
in point: A letter March 9, which was written before the correction
ran. In your "editor’s note" to the letter, you stated that a
correction had been made. If a demeaning article is front page
material, so, too, should your correction be. This story mattered!Nancee Letter
Seven Lakes
