Regret the Error

A few hours before I received my award from the National Press Club in Washington, I paid a visit to the Newseum. It’s housed in a lovely new building, but I mostly cared about the bathrooms.

As was the case at its old location, the Newseum bathroom walls are covered in corrections, errors and other press flubs. As soon as I arrived, producer Ken Crawford took me into a bathroom. Some shots from the bathrooms are at the bottom of this post (I’m told the male and female washrooms have the same content), and you can view all of my Newseum photos here. You can also go there to view the larger versions.

Aside from the bathrooms, I was happy to see the Newseum offer additional accuracy-related content. Crawford created an eight-minute video, “Getting it Right,” that looks at the coverage of the 2000 U.S. election, the case of Richard Jewell, and examines why errors occur (carelessness, deception etc.), among other topics. It’s an interesting introduction to the issue. The same theatre also shows a short film about bias. After it finished, the man sitting behind me said, “That was a biased look at the issue of bias.”

The Newseum also has a display devoted to errors and corrections. It includes that famous front page Lexington-Herald clarification from 2004:

A brief word about corrections:

A look at the Sago disaster:

How mistakes are made:

The obligatory (and, sorry, blurry) Dewey Defeats Truman image:

Two more famous errors (I know, I’m not much of a photographer):

On trust:

Bias:

Newseum Bathroom Photos

This is the introductory text in the bathroom:

A bathroom correction and some other errors:

One final note: the Newseum’s entrance has a large ticker featuring the latest headlines from AP. I couldn’t help but chuckle when I spotted a typo scrolling by. Sorry, no photo.

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