David W. Dunlap was brought back to the memory of that first Times byline thanks to a recent interview about WKCR. He subsequently wrote a post for the Times City Room blog about his memory of that first story, and how it relates to recent news at the station. His post included a scan of the original 1981 story. As a result of that old story being resurfaced, Dunlap learned that he’d made two errors in his story. So he blogged about those, too:

Bad enough to discover, on revisiting the article, that I’d misstated the cross street at which the tower was situated. (I said it was 54th Street.)

Then came this e-mail: “I was Googling WKCR and found this article below. I had no idea that I was a part of your first article and that James Gleick was your editor! It was fun to know this after so many years. Michael Silberstein. P.S. It’s Silberstein, not Silverstein.”

Goes to show that it’s never too late for a reader — or long lost source — to help you fix some errors.

An article about the investigation into the abduction and death of Milly Dowler (News of the World hacked Milly Dowler’s phone during police hunt, 5 July, page 1) stated that voicemail “messages were deleted by [NoW] journalists in the first few days after Milly’s disappearance in order to free up space for more messages. As a result friends and relatives of Milly concluded wrongly that she might still be alive.” Since this story was published new evidence – as reported in the Guardian of 10 December – has led the Metropolitan police to believe that this was unlikely to have been correct and that while the News of the World hacked Milly Dowler’s phone the newspaper is unlikely to have been responsible for the deletion of a set of voicemails from the phone that caused her parents to have false hopes that she was alive, according to a Metropolitan police statement made to the Leveson inquiry on 12 December.

Even with the correction appended, one of the subheads on the story still reads, “Deleted voicemails gave family false hope”. That seems to implicate the NoW. The Guardian has been criticized for this routine correction to a major allegation. Storyful has a look at some reaction from former NoW journalists.

Writing in the Independent, Stephen Glover offered this assessment:

Some people might think The Guardian owes us a more comprehensive apology than a brief posting at the top of an online article published five months ago. But the paper’s editor, Alan Rusbridger, does not like apologising since to do so would suggest that, even though he inhabits the upper reaches of Mount Olympus, he is made of flesh and blood like the rest of us. He did carry a story in Saturday’s paper under the headline “Police logs raise questions over the deletion of Dowler voicemails”, but it did not contain the blunt admission of error conveyed by the posting, far less an apology. Ironically, it was co-written by Nick Davies, one of the co-authors of the 4 July article.

Thanks, Norman!

We regret the inadvertent publication of the article titled “Shia-Sunni reconciliation” by Saleem Ali in our print edition of December 9, 2011 and subsequently on our website.
The article was published without exercising proper editorial judgment. We apologise for the mistake and to our readers whose religious sentiments were hurt. We will not be taking any more articles from this writer. The article has been removed from the website Link

The same apology appeared on Pakistan News Today. Here’s where the offending article originally appeared. It’s now a 404 page, though Google news has this excerpt:

For example, Maulana Ishaq’s sermons on Shia-Sunni unity (given in Urdu), which have hundreds of thousands of hits on YouTube, are heartening. They discourage Shias from hurling abuse but also admonish Sunnis from being emotional about respect and …

I contacted Saleem Ali, the author, for additional details and he said he objects to the removal of the piece. Ali is a professor of environmental studies at the University of Vermont. From his email reply to me:

This was a case of being bullied by some religious zealots who kept calling any criticism of ritual “hate speech.”
While some language was insensitive and i apologized for that — it was by no means “hate speech.” I dont approve of their decision to remove but can understand it in Pakistan’s tough media environment.
You will note the comments under the retraction that majority of readers did not think it should be removed.
I reposted the article on my blog — with an image to show the kind of ritual I was criticizing and also a preface with context and apology for the particular word usage.

He offered additional detail on his blog, writing that the piece “was a test of free speech in Pakistan and it is clear that the country is still stuck in a time warp of religious hypersensitivity.” Also from his post (emphasis his):

In the rush to write we can all be sometimes negligent and I recognize that the choice of words in describing some of the rituals was insensitive but certainly not hateful. To show due respect and in a spirit of amity I have removed the language which described the state of the mourners in the procession as “high on testosterone” (and God knows what else).” In retrospect this was indeed an inappropriate statement and I apologize unconditionally for use of that statement.

Ali told me via email that “this became an issue of personal safety as well.” He said he was subject to verbal attacks on Twitter, had his Wikipedia page vandalized, and that some people wrote letters to the president of his university to try to get Ali fired.

“The university of course realized that these accusations were baseless and actually offered me police protection (not that I need it in Vermont!),” he said. “However, given the high rates of kidnappings of writers in Pakistan such bullying and defamation is a serious issue. I have family in Pakistan and this has caused us sleepless nights for the past few days.”

Update Deceber 13, 2011: Ali also wrote about the incident for the website of Foreign Policy.

In fact, his body wasn’t found until a couple of days later. The Mail story said Mulrooney had been found in the River Lee. In reality, he was found in a yard belonging to a business. The paper also hinted at suicide, but that doesn’t appear to have been a factor.

What an outrageous, unconscionable mess.

As as result of the false report, the president of the school’s student union sent a letter to the paper demanding an apology. And the Student council banned sales of the paper on campus. Now that an apology has been published, the ban will be revisited when the council meets int he new year. A report from IrishCentral.com:

The motion to ban ‘the Mail’ was passed after students promised to seek some measure of reprisal for the tabloid having deliberately invented the story in a callous and calculated bid to merely sell more copies.
An apology was printed in the newspaper yesterday, and a marketing manager for the paper’s parent company said that the editor had personally travelled to Cork to meet with members of Caolan’s family to express his sorrow at the pieces publication.

Here’s the apology, via the University Times: