Regret the Error

This post marks the debut of You Don’t Say, a new column by John McIntyre for Regret the Error. John, a newspaper copy editor for 30 years, oversaw The Baltimore Sun’s copy desk from 1995 to 2009. He has taught copy editing at Loyola of Maryland since 1995, and he has conducted workshops on writing and editing at more than two dozen publications and professional organizations in the United States and Canada. On this site, John will bring a copy editor’s perspective to errors, accuracy and corrections. You can follow his blog on editing and related subjects, You Don’t Say. He can also be found on Facebook and on Twitter as @johnemcintyre.

By John E. McIntyre

Not everything that is wrong merits public correction.

It would be extremely unusual, for example, for a newspaper, magazine, or Web site to run a formal correction for an error in grammar or English usage, or for a typographical error, though there are exceptions, as when 24 Hours quoted a councilman as saying that the costs of a tunnel were “now being lowballed” instead of “not being lowballed.” Such lapses are dealt with, if at all, in in-house newsletters or memos, of which Philip B. Corbett’s excellent After Deadline at The New York Times website is an example.  

Formal corrections, such as those aggregated on this site, almost always focus on errors of fact: 

The wrong name for a person or organization — The New York Times has admitted to getting Procter and Gamble’s name wrong as Proctor and Gamble more than 100 times.  

Erroneous statistics — The Toronto Star published in May that 1,700 wind turbines are in operation in Europe; the number is about 74,000. Also in May, the paper estimated the cost or a new nuclear plant as $7,000 per megawatt of installed capacity, but the correct number is $7,000 per kilowatt. Distinguishing between mega and kilo, like the distinction between million and billion, is a hazard for mathematically impaired journalists. 

Bungled photo captions — The Washington Times ran a photo of the Obama children to illustrate an article about homicides of children in Chicago.

Recipes — You might not want to attempt any published recipe until, say, five days or a week past publication. The Hamilton Spectator ran a recipe for a ginger cake during Celiac Awareness Month than called for two cups of penne pasta instead of two cups of rice pasta.   

Popular culture — The Guardian’s  review of the latest Star Trek movie referred to a character as a Klingon rather than a Romulan, and the Los Angeles Times referred to the character as Captain Nemo instead of Captain Nero.

Wrong word — The New York Times quoted Rep. Anthony D. Weiner as saying, “You’ll forgive some of my constituents for wanting to get into the fetal poison and bathe in Purell.” He said “fetal position.”  

And more, such as people who are very much alive being reported as dead.  

But not even every error of fact winds up being corrected. When errors are identified, a responsible editor or small group of editors will determine whether they are significant enough to merit formal notice. How many minor errors of fact pass unnoticed is not easy to determine. But published corrections almost always follow when a reader complains of an error.

Sometimes a publication decides to run a clarification rather than a correction, in contexts in which the published statement of fact was technically accurate but lacked some nuance of wording or additional detail and therefore permitted a misreading.  

And in the free-for-all word of electronic publishing, some Web sites do not commonly publish corrections at all, instead updating the published articles with silent corrections as the day wears on. Bloggers, or at least the responsible ones, will authorize readers’ corrections through comments and will also apologize for errors in comments or subsequent posts. But the practice on the Web has not yet standardized.  

One thing that the Internet has beneficially fostered is the proliferation of apologies for plagiarisms and fabrication. The ease of theft through copying and pasting electronic texts is matched only by the ease of detection of such theft. And with bloggers and other commentators quick to jump on any publication detected in apparent jiggery-pokery — such as Maureen Dowd’s recent appropriation of a passage from Josh Marshall’s Talking Points Memo — it becomes difficult for a publication to deal quietly and privately with these matters.

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