A correction to a blog post (”Things you might not know about Barack Obama”) on the Rocky Mountain News’ website:
One of the items on this list has been removed because it mistakenly repeated a report that Barack Obama holds dual United States-Kenyan citizenship. This erroneous information was never reported in the Rocky Mountain News print edition.
Thus no print correction. Some background on the origin of the information is here.
Thanks, Ernest!
UPDATE Aug. 17: John Temple, the paper’s editor, wrote a Saturday column about this error. An excerpt:
… What happened, I think, is an object lesson in how a local news organization like the Rocky Mountain News now plays in a global arena – and the increased responsibility that carries with it. In the old days, if we made a mistake on a story about a national issue, it’s unlikely it would have been noticed beyond our circulation boundaries. Now we can end up on Keith Olbermann’s “worst person in the world” feature and cited as an authoritative source by countless blogs who use our good name to make their case …
Our story, meant as a bright and informative read, included such tidbits as the fact that he graduated magna cum laude from Harvard Law School.
But it also contained this eight-word sentence: “Holds both American and Kenyan (since 1963) citizenship.” We cited no source, but at the bottom of the story we listed three: biography.com, Internet Movie Database, Atlanta Journal Constitution.
The citizenship claim didn’t raise any red flags for the journalists involved. They knew his father was from Kenya and didn’t view the “fact” as a negative.
What can I say? I know this might sound incredible that we could have accepted as fact something that anyone who follows politics should have known was false. But another lesson I’ve learned in journalism is that if we can make a mistake, eventually we will – and the reason often is that even smart journalists sometimes let down their guard.
But it didn’t take long before we learned that our report was raising questions.
On Friday we heard from an anti-Obama blogger, Texasdarlin, and began an exchange that resulted in us e-mailing the Obama campaign headquarters. Their response included the statement: “We understand the difficulties a delay in response may cause and certainly appreciate your patience.”
If only they knew.
On Monday the story was viewed nearly 18,000 times. That afternoon the potential problem was brought to my attention when I received a respectful e-mail from Colorado Media Matters, a nonprofit that monitors what it perceives as conservative bias in the media. I immediately asked key editors to review the issue and to respond.
After we realized that our reporting was flawed, we removed the claim from the story Monday night. But we failed to add a correction to the story, as we should have, under our policy …
A related note: aside from the Obama story, the Rocky’s most recent online correction is from mid-July. But the paper published several print corrections in July and August that aren’t on the site. With that criticism noted, I’ll point out that the Rocky publishes an annual tally of its corrections, something that’s done by relatively few papers.
