In early July, the paper reported that Prime Minister Stephen Harper had pocketed the communion wafer given to him by a Roman Catholic priest at the funeral of former Governor-General Romeo LeBlanc. That report sparked an onslaught of other stories, eventually forcing the PM’s spokesman to issue a formal denial.

Today’s apology states that the allegation was inserted by an editor "without the knowledge of the reporters and without any credible support…" It does not state whether or not the editor in question deliberately fabricated the wafer incident or if he/she was passing on gossip. Either way, this is a huge embarrassment and a totally unacceptable course of events. It’s all the more notable because the paper in question was in the spotlight earlier this summer after it fired an intern for questionable reasons. Details on that are below. Here’s the apology:

On Wednesday, July 8, 2009, the Telegraph-Journal published a story about the funeral mass celebrating the life of former Governor-General Romeo LeBlanc that was inaccurate and should not have been published. We pride ourselves in maintaining high standards of journalism and ethical reporting, and regret this was not followed in this case.

The story stated that a senior Roman Catholic priest in New Brunswick had demanded that the Prime Minister’s Office explain what happened to the communion wafer which was handed to Prime Minister Harper during the celebration of communion at the funeral mass. The story also said that during the communion celebration, the Prime Minister "slipped the thin wafer that Catholics call ‘the host’ into his jacket pocket".

There was no credible support for these statements of fact at the time this article was published, nor is the Telegraph-Journal aware of any credible support for these statements now. Our reporters Rob Linke and Adam Huras, who wrote the story reporting on the funeral, did not include these statements in the version of the story that they wrote. In the editing process, these statements were added without the knowledge of the reporters and without any credible support for them.

The Telegraph-Journal sincerely apologizes to the Prime Minister for the harm that this inaccurate story has caused. We also apologize to reporters Rob Linke and Adam Huras and to our readers for our failure to meet our own standards of responsible journalism and accuracy in reporting.

So has the editor in question been fired? That’s an important query given not only the seriousness of this incident, but also because the paper’s actions earlier this summer require it to take a hard line with inaccuracy. I wrote a column about the paper’s firing of a summer intern named Matt McCann after he made factual errors in a story that may have made things uncomfortable for the paper’s owners, the wealthy Irving family.

The paper said McCann’s errors and the alleged lack of balance in his story were not up to its standards. So they fired him. (I don’t support their decision.) Now this. So will the editor in chief — who defended her decision to fire the student — step down for this major lapse on her watch? Ed: See update 3 below It would seem that’s a fair course of action considering the standard it set by firing McCann. As noted above, the apology also doesn’t detail whether the offending editor has been fired. Given the paper’s recent history, it should be more forthcoming about the consequences of this unprecedented incident.

UPDATE: Not long after publishing this post, I heard from a few sources that the editor and publisher’s names were not listed on the paper’s masthead in today’s edition. Dan McHardie noted this on Twitter, and I confirmed it with two other people. The paper hasn’t issued any formal statement so it’s too early to know if the absence of their names carries real significance. I’ll keep an eye on it.

UPDATE 2: I’d love to get your thoughts via email (editor at regrettheerror.com) or in the comments of this post: what’s the proper protocol for an editor when adding new information to a story? Should they always tell the reporter? Does it depend on the information? And for reporters: give me your best stories about having errors inserted into your work. (Don’t worry, I’m not looking to go after copy editors, but we all know this happens.) I’m hoping to use some thoughts and anecdotes for my Friday Columbia Journalism Review Column.

UPDATE 3: CBC reports that the editor and publisher are gone:

The publisher and editor of the New Brunswick Telegraph-Journal are no longer with the paper after it was forced to apologize to Stephen Harper and two of its own reporters over a story about whether the prime minister took communion at the state funeral of former governor general Roméo LeBlanc.

CBC News has confirmed that editor Shawna Richer has been fired and that Jamie Irving is no longer the publisher of the paper. Earlier, their names had been removed from the paper’s list of senior staff.

Some excerpts from my Columbia Journalism Review column:

Matt McCann wasn’t supposed to spend his summer working for St. Thomas University in Fredericton, New Brunswick.

For the second year in a row, McCann, a journalism student at St. Thomas, had landed a summer internship at the Telegraph-Journal. But that ended abruptly in May when he was fired a day after the paper published a story of his on the front page.

McCann’s article reported that roughly 100 faculty and staff from the University of New Brunswick had signed a letter protesting the school’s decision to award Premier Shawn Graham an honorary degree. After it was published, representatives from the university called the paper’s publisher and editor to talk about the article.

“We were really looking to elaborate our position,” UNB communications manager Dan Tanaka told the Toronto Star. “We felt we were given a minor mention at the bottom of the story.”

Apart from that gripe, the story contained three factual errors. McCann misspelled a person’s last name (“Stropel” instead of “Strople”) and title (“university secretary for UNB Fredericton” instead of “university secretary for UNB”). He also reported that the premier has an education degree from UNB—when, in fact, he has a physical education degree.

The errors were easily preventable and should not have appeared in the story. As far as them being a firing offense, however, I’ve never heard of anyone being let go for mistakes of this nature. Far more experienced journalists have repeatedly made worse mistakes and kept their jobs. Certainly that’s nothing to be proud of, but the Telegraph-Journal held McCann to a standard that other staffers can’t possibly meet…

Shawna Richer, the paper’s editor, has faced criticism for her decision to fire McCann. She insists the factual mistakes combined with the one-sided nature of the story to make it a deal breaker. Yet even the university spokesman told the Star that he was “surprised” to hear McCann was let go. In spite of their concerns, they didn’t ask for him to lose his job. (Read the story for yourself and decide if it’s so lacking in fairness and balance that the author deserves to be drummed out of a summer contract.)

The story of McCann’s firing eventually made its way to local radio in Saint John. During the report, a former editor of the paper in question suggested that the publisher, Jamie Irving, made McCann the scapegoat in order to maintain good relations with the governing party. That suggestion caused the Telegraph-Journal to respond with a story headlined, “CBC runs baseless story with no regard for facts or truth.”

From the story, which doesn’t match the aggressive tone of the headline:

“These kinds of errors of fact and judgment don’t constitute acceptable journalism at the Telegraph-Journal. We must cover stories with integrity, clarity and absolute accuracy,” Shawna Richer, the newspaper’s editor, said.

In a conversation that day with Richer, McCann acknowledged the errors but “did not seem to fully grasp the seriousness of them,” Richer said. “He was not a first-year intern. He worked here last summer. We expected more of him.”

Richer says the call was hers alone and no one pressured her. The paper has also acknowledged that McCann’s story was, obviously, reviewed by editors. After all, they deemed it good enough to warrant major front page placement. Those editors have all kept their jobs.

But if we accept Richer’s standard for fairness and accuracy, then I’m afraid to say that someone else at her paper needs to lose their job. If you read the online version of the article, you’ll notice that McCann’s three factual errors—which were deemed so bad that they were a major cause of his firing—are still in the article. The paper hasn’t corrected them. Those errors are still causing damage, and it was someone’s job to fix them in the online version, not to mention issue a correction.

So who else is going to lose their job? Or is it possible that the standard being enforced by the paper doesn’t apply to anyone but McCann?

Comedy of Errors

Jay Leno has made amusing, mistaken, and otherwise notable newspaper headlines a staple of his show. Recently, his rivals got into the media mistake act. This could either be a disconcerting example of kicking newspapers when they’re down, or perhaps it’s late night comedy’s way of reminding people that newspapers are still relevant. Either way, it’s been an amusing few weeks.
Last week comic Andy Kindler appeared on Late Show with David Letterman. Kindler, an occasional correspondent for the show, makes a habit of calling out other comedians and the industry as a whole during his annual “State of the Industry” address at the Just For Laughs Festival in Montreal.
I interviewed him a couple of years ago and listened to him launch bombs at Larry the Cable Guy, Wayne Brady, and Will Ferrell for his role in Blades of Glory. “I love Will Ferrell, but I don’t want to see Will Ferrell holding up the guy from Napoleon Dynamite while on skates,” he said.
Of particular note is the fact that Kindler had nothing but nice words for Letterman when we spoke. But that didn’t appear to be the case when he was interviewed by a fellow Montreal journalist just a couple of months ago. The Gazette of Montreal quoted Kindler as saying, “Bottom line is that Letterman is unwatchable now.”
As soon as he took his seat next to Letterman, Kindler began explaining that he had been misquoted. Letterman even pitched in by holding up a copy of the article in question…

Everything Old Is New Again

During The New York Times’s 4 p.m. news meeting on Tuesday, a gathering that draws top editors from the paper, the culture editor described a story for the next day’s paper that included a connection to a Times article from over a century ago
The current article reported about a secret inscription rumored to have been added to a watch belonging to Abraham Lincoln. On Tuesday, the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History revealed that it had opened the watch and confirmed the presence of the hidden message.
“Basically, as an aside, the culture editor said: ‘Interestingly, the Times wrote an article on the jeweler [who made the engraving] in 1906 in which he discussed the inscription. But it turns out he had it wrong’,” says Greg Brock, a Times senior editor and the person in charge of the paper’s corrections.
The assembled editors shared a chuckle about the mistake from roughly a century ago. Brock, however, immediately locked eyes with Craig Whitney, the paper’s standards editor and his boss. “We both kind of raised our eyebrows as if to say. ‘Hmm, maybe we should…’,” he says.
They did. On Wednesday, the paper published a correction to the erroneous article from 1906 …

Sources of Error

He spoke with a polished English accent, once shared a crème brûlée torte with Hillary Clinton, and spent part of the summer officiating tennis at the 2008 Beijing Olympics.
Charles Carlson gave every indication that he was a student worth watching at the University of Minnesota when he sat down for an interview with the Minnesota Daily, a student newspaper, during the Democratic National Convention in August. Carlson was an at-large delegate at the convention. He later announced his candidacy for the Minneapolis City Council.
“He was a Beijing Olympics tennis official and is a University graduate student, GLBT rights advocate and director of operations at a Minneapolis architecture firm,” read the Daily’s story about him. “Is there anything Charles Carlson doesn’t do?”
This week the paper answered its own question: tell the truth. An investigation published on Monday by the Daily revealed that Carlson had lied about many of his achievements.
There was no communal torting with Hillary, and he didn’t officiate at the Olympics. Carlson grew up and went to school in Minnesota, which meant his transcripts from Phillips Exeter Academy, Princeton University and two schools in England were forged. When confronted with the evidence, he admitted that he suffers from a mental illness for which he was once institutionalized. The English accent disappeared, too.
“I spent six years being a gay nothing that people just made fun of, and then when I was discharged I found out that people would believe anything you told them,” he told the Daily.
Carlson is far from alone in discovering that members of the public and journalists, be they student reporters or veteran scribes, will often take the facts at face value. An old saying in journalism holds that, “If your grandmother tells you she loves you, check it out.” It’s good advice, but rarely followed…

Close to Home

One strict rule in the medical profession holds that no doctors can treat themselves or any member of their immediate family. The press, however, is without a similar proscription. Be it good news or bad, news organizations routinely report about themselves.
Newspapers write obituaries for long serving editors, executives and reporters. An award for reporting or photography, or a spike or drop in circulation or profit, is always dutifully reported. Plagiarism or fabrication often, though unfortunately not always, results in a story.
Just as doctors can’t marshal the necessary detachment when examining their own condition, truth and accuracy can sometimes be sacrificed in the name of marketing. One of the best examples of spin you’ll ever see in a newspaper is when the latest circulation figures are released for a city with competing daily papers. Regardless of the figures, both sides will claim victory. (Sadly, it’s less of an issue these days.) …

The News Business Is Changing. Again.

Walter Isaacson began his recent Time essay about the news business by declaring that “the crisis in journalism has reached meltdown proportions.” He suggested that a micropayment system could help encourage people to pay for online news. For all of its faults, Isaacson’s argument did micropayments proud by inspiring many people to give their own two cents on the matter.

Setting aside the micropayments issue, we’re left with Isaacson’s declaration about the news business. Whether or not you share Isaacson’s view that journalism is in a state of crisis, these are undeniably interesting times for the profession. A wave of change is crashing over journalism and the business built around it. By my count, it’s the fourth such wave, at least in terms of accuracy and quality.

The first wave occured in seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century Europe during the birth of the newspaper. Prior to that time, printed news came in the form of “newsbooks.” These were one-off publications containing a mix of commentary and news that was gathered by word of mouth, from ship captains, or simply by copying from other newsbooks. Their ephemeral nature—a newsbook might appear one day never to be seen again—meant that most publishers didn’t have to worry about someone complaining about an inaccuracy in a previous issue. That changed when publishers started adhering to a set production frequency. The newsbook became the newspaper …

Glass Houses

It’s not recognized as one of the fundamentals of the profession, but journalists spend a lot of time pointing out other people’s mistakes.
Major news over the past few weeks has included Cabinet nominees that erred in their tax filings, a famous baseball player who took performance enhancing drugs, and an Olympic champion who inhaled performance inhibiting drugs.
Journalists spend a lot of time holding public officials and institutions accountable for their actions. That inevitably means we spend time on the mistake beat: who made them, why they made them, and whether or not they offered an appropriate apology.
It’s important work, but it also leaves the press open to accusations of hypocrisy when it does a poor job of admitting and correcting its own mistakes …

From today’s column (click on the headline for the full text):

Checklist Charlie

In 1935, Boeing Corporation almost went bankrupt after its Model 299 long-range bomber literally crashed and burned during a U.S. Army flight competition. Major Ployer P. Hill, the pilot, and one other crew member died in the crash. As a result, the Army contract went to a competing company, causing major financial difficulties for Boeing.
As a consolation, the Army ordered a few Model 299s for further testing. The question was how to fly them safely. The New Yorker’s Atul Gawande writes that the Army eventually “came up with an ingeniously simple approach: they created a pilot’s checklist, with step-by-step checks for takeoff, flight, landing, and taxiing.”
“With the checklist in hand, the pilots went on to fly the Model 299 a total of 1.8 million miles without one accident,” according to Gawande. The Army eventually ordered thousands of the aircraft, which became known as the B-17.
Gawande’s December 2007 story is a paean to the checklist, one of the simplest and most effective error-reduction tools. Checklists have been proven to work for pilots, doctors, nurses, and even people working at a nuclear power stations. For example, the use of a World Health Organization surgical safety checklist helped reduce inpatient deaths following operations by 40 percent, according to a studyNew England Journal of Medicine. published in the
Checklists also work for journalists. We just don’t use them …

From my January 30th column:

Homegrown Errorists

The package arrived two weeks ago, a bulging manila envelope with a return address in Decatur, Illinois. Inside was a mass of paper with a polite letter placed on top.
“Dear Mr. Silverman,” it began, “you have published a book on errors found in journalism and have a website devoted to the subject.” The writer, Robert S. Reed, continued on for two pages:

As a subscriber to the Herald & Review in Decatur Illinois, I have seen hundreds of errors in newspaper articles in addition to errors in the photo captions and the headlines/sub-headings. Most are misspelled words, missing words, extra words, wrong verb tenses, and, in some cases, factual inaccuracies.
Two of the articles from 2008 are attached to illustrate my point … I am also attaching 82 photo captions that appeared in the Decatur Herald & Review in 2008. All contain errors of one type or another. The corrections are indicated in ink. Also enclosed are 35 copies of headlines and sub-headings.

The more than 100 clippings were roughly an inch thick, and Reed was as good as his word. Each page correctly noted a copy editing or factual error from the paper. Red ink was everywhere, and in all the right places. The collection represented hours of work, not to mention the time spent photocopying them for delivery to me.
Some may wonder why anyone would choose to dedicate this amount of time to cataloging the errors in their local paper. But it’s no surprise to me at all. I’ve seen it before. (Plus, I’ve dedicated the last four years to reading hundreds of thousands of corrections and errors. I’m in no position to judge.) …

Today’s column:

A Rare Peek at Why Errors Occur

Last Sunday’s New York Times was a treasure trove of accuracy-related information, and I don’t mean the paper’s corrections column.
Readers were treated to a pair of articles that offered an impressive amount of insight into mistakes. One was a rare look back at the causes of recent mistakes made by the Times; the other piece seemingly had nothing to do with the press, yet it was just as valuable to journalism.
In the first story of note, Clark Hoyt, the public editor, dedicated his column to walking back the cat on three Times errors.
“Last month,” he wrote, “because reporters and editors in three different parts of the paper did not take enough pains to verify information, The Times reported as fact a political telephone call that didn’t happen, fell victim to a faked letter to the editor, and published a sensational anecdote about a college football recruiting battle that the paper cannot be confident is true.”
Hoyt took the time to go to the editors and reporters involved in the mistakes and ask them how and why the errors occured. The reasons included failing to follow the paper’s existing verification policies (the fake letter) and poor communication (the phantom phone call). The “sensational anecdote” was published due to the combination of an uncooperative and unreliable source, an editor working on Christmas day, and a high school English essay that included a reference to women “romancing each other.”
To those who think accuracy is boring stuff, eat your hearts out …

Last week’s:

To Repeat or Not To Repeat?

To repeat or not to repeat?
It’s a simple question, yet it has vexed editors and correction writers for decades. Is it nobler to restate the error in a correction, or to offer a basic description of the mistake?
Derek Donovan, the reader’s editor of the Kansas City Star, adheres to a policy that proscribes restating the error in a correction. In a recent blog post, he offered a hypothetical scenario:
“For example, let’s say a story refers to Jamie Smith, but she really spells her name Jamie Smyth. The correction should not say: A story in the Nov. 26 Local section misspelled Jamie Smyth’s last name as Smith.
That’s a bad idea because it puts the mistake in the paper a second time. Better simply to write: A story in the Nov. 26 Local section misspelled Jamie Smyth’s last name.”
The goal of not stating the error is to prevent the paper from compounding the offense. It’s similar to the policy of not repeating a libelous statement …

The week before last:

Letter Imperfect

Though it takes up a relatively small amount of real estate, a newspaper or magazine’s letters to the editor section punches far above its weight when it comes to errors and corrections.
Just over the past couple of years, there have been plagiarized letters that made it into print, letters that included egregious factual errors and accusations, letters that were attributed to the wrong person, and letters that were significantly altered due to sloppy editing. Last month alone there were two notable letter errors …

CJR column:

The Year in Errata

About a month ago, I began the laborious and depressing task of scouring the archives of Regret the Error to find the best of the worst in media errors and corrections from 2008. I published my annual round-up earlier this week, and you can read it here, along with a month-by-month listing of incidents of plagiarism and fabrication.

It’s strange enough that I spent an hour or two a day tracking accuracy news and reading hundreds of corrections. Then, once a year, I go back and spend hours re-reading everything I published. Setting aside the obvious element of repetition, the worst part is having to relive a year of journalism scandals, errors and ethical infractions …

Toronto Star:

Another year of errors and regrets

Readers of the New Hampshire-based Valley News couldn’t help but shake their heads. On July 21, the paper’s lead story reported Barack Obama had called the situation in Afghanistan “precarious,” but the biggest news was far above the fold: the paper had misspelled its own name. People were reading the Valley Newss.

“Readers may have noticed that the Valley News misspelled its own name on yesterday’s front page,” read a subsequent editor’s note. “Given that we routinely call on other institutions to hold themselves accountable for their mistakes, let us say for the record: we sure feel silly.”

Take heart, Valley News – you’re in good company.

Since 2004, I have been tracking press errors and corrections on my website, RegretTheError.com. Every year at this time I publish the best of the worst, along with a month-by-month catalogue of incidents of plagiarism and fabrication. In both cases, I have a lot of material to work with.

As a journalist, my professional pride takes a hit when, for example, the venerable Associated Press describes Senator Joseph Lieberman as a former “Democratic vice-presidential prick” or The Australian misquotes a beauty pageant contestant as having said she believes in “injustice and inequality.” …

Death by Obiticide

I have some bad news to pass along this week: two people were killed as a result of sloppy journalism.

It happens more often than you might expect. It’s frequent enough, in fact, that I’ve come up with a name for this phenomenon: obiticide. Death by media error.

Newsday was one of the guilty parties, as evidenced by this correction:

In an article published yesterday about autism, some editions reported incorrectly that Vito “Billy” Albanese Jr. died at an out-of-state residential facility. Albanese is living in Brooklyn with his father.

British paper The Observer also published a correction to atone for shunting Ted Sorensen into an early grave:

Ted Sorensen, the author of Counselor, was unfortunately described as ‘the late’ in our Books pages last week; we are happy to report that John F Kennedy’s adviser and speechwriter is still very much with us. And Julia Blackburn, not Blackwell, wrote The Three of Us, published by Cape (Books, last week). Apologies.

Sorensen is something of a mistake magnet. Last year, The New York Times admitted that it had misspelled his name more than 135 times over the last fifty-plus years. If given the choice, though, Sorensen probably prefers having his name mangled to being knocked off. Still, he’s in good company. This Wikipedia page shows just how many famous people have been felled before their time by premature obituaries.

I dedicated an entire chapter of my book to obiticide (and you can read a chapter excerpt here), but that’s hardly put the issue to rest. Just this past year, newspapers have killed off Frank McCourt, Billy Graham (twice!), Muhammad Ali, Pat Robertson and Victor Willis of Village People fame. (Okay, it’s a bit of a stretch to include the last one.) …

Scrubbing Away Their Sins

We used to be able to throw out the news; to disappear it.

The morning paper would find its way into the trash. A radio or television newscast would float off into the ether. It’s a cliché to say it by now, but the Web has changed that.

Articles and broadcasts now reside in online archives, are quoted or embedded on blogs, and republished on other news sites. Google keeps a snapshot of the original page cached on its servers. The new permanence of news makes it more important than ever to initially get a story right, lest an error rocket around the world. But when prevention fails, a suitable correction must follow. Unfortunately, that doesn’t always happen …

This column is a chance for me to provide some context for notable corrections and errors. I also include the week’s best corrections and apologies. Below are links to some recent columns, and I’ll be posting my latest offering to the site each week.

Everything Old Is New Again

Just over two months ago, shares of UAL, the parent company of United Airlines, fell by as much as 76 percent. The root cause of the drop in price was a Chicago Tribune article published on the website of Florida’s Sun-Sentinel that reported United was filing for bankruptcy. Eventually, the story found its way onto Google News, where…

The Art of the Fake Correction

The groups responsible for this week’s fake edition of The New York Times took great care to produce a newspaper that looked like the real thing. They mimicked the paper’s fonts and layout, included an imagined column by Thomas Friedman, and even launched an accompanying website. Regular Times readers also experienced the familiar sensation of finding…

Apologies Not Acceptable

The Washington Post’s correction policy has some elegant turns of phrase, including “Preventing and correcting mistakes are two sides of the coin of our realm: accuracy.” But it says nothing about apologies. Could that be because “The Washington Post doesn’t apologize”?
That quote was attributed to a Post editor in an e-mail published by the Washington City…

Weapons of Mass Reduction

In its most basic and useful form, a correction fixes erroneous reporting and provides a public admission for an error. Though it rarely tops 100 words, the correction, when properly deployed, can also be transformed into a weapon of mass reduction (as in ego).
Witness, for example, The Washington Post’s choice of words this week when correcting…

A Treasury of Page Six Corrections

Gossip is a cutthroat business. It’s also an error-prone one.
Mistakes are inevitable when you trade in rumors and rely on “spies” and self-interested publicists to feed you product. Or, yes, when you simply make things up in order to sell magazines or newspapers.
The New York Post’s Page Six, the grande dame of old school gossip columns, has had…

Ils Regretteront L’Erreur

Le Monde, a highly respected French newspaper, committed an error so egregious on Wednesday that its editors believed the only way to correct their mistake was to publish a front page apology.
Had the paper falsely accused someone of a crime, or damaged a company’s stock price as a result of incorrect reporting? Maybe it had discovered an incident of…