Today Regret kicks off a series of interviews with media critics, ombudsmen, journalists and other media people.
Our first conversation is with Seth Mnookin, a former Newsweek media columnist who is now a contributing editor to Vanity Fair and the author of the excellent book, Hard News. Mnookin was a natural candidate for a chat because he took the unusual — and admirable — step of including corrections in the recently published paperback edition of his book. He also made them available to everyone at his website. (We suggest you peruse them before reading this interview).
Regret talked to him about the book’s corrections, fact checking, and the time a spellchecker butchered his front page story.
The quip I made at the end of this post elicited a reaction from you. It was a pretty glib remark, so tell me: How many of the errors in the book were preventable?
The error that I think was preventable, and that I feel most responsible for, was the one I highlighted in the corrections section itself. That was the relationship between then metro editor Jon Landman and then national editor Jim Roberts. The reason it was so preventable was because it was a situation in which I should have checked with the principals. I tried to have, and thought I did have, a policy throughout working on the book that anytime anyone came up in the book, and it was someone I was in touch with, I would run it by them for the sake of making sure I got everything correct. I don’t have a good answer for why it slipped by me on that one. It just did…I’m not sure what happened there. That’s the one I feel was most preventable, and that I was most responsible for.
As for the other ones, I’m just not sure it’s possible to do a book that’s 100,000 words long and not make small errors…
Do you think any of the errors in your book had first occurred in other sources?
The Jon Landman/Jim Roberts one. I did get that from another source.
That doesn’t excuse me from making it because, as I said in the corrections
section, I did talk to them. That was something repeated from somewhere
else, but that doesn’t make it any less bad.
That was one of the reasons I tried to have a pretty extensive source
notes section. I think it’s something you don’t see a lot in
narrative non-fiction books. I wanted there to be a high level of
transparency if anyone wanted to use my book as a resource. I hoped
that including pretty extensive source notes would would help future
readers figure out where this information came from.
There was one mistake I had which was who wrote the Sept. 12 “U.S.
Attacked” headline [in the Times]. In the hardcover edition I had Al
Siegal and I got that from a New Yorker story by Ken Auletta. There was
no real way I could have checked that. The person who did write [the
headline] only got in touch with me when the book came out…
Also, because it was in the New Yorker there is kind of an assumption
that their fact checking department, along with Ken Auletta, would be
pretty trustworthy.
This is where it gets a little bit to the nature of truth and truth in
journalism. That was something that they got technically wrong, but, in
another sense, didn’t get wrong. My understanding is that in the
confusion of September 11 there was some uncertainty about who actually
wrote that headline. Someone told Ken Auletta that Al Siegal wrote it.
Then the fact checker from the New Yorker called that person to verify
it and that person said, “Yeah, Al Siegal wrote that.” No one was trying
to deceive the New Yorker or the public. There was a lot going on that
day and headlines don’t have bylines, so it’s hard to know exactly what
the situation is.
I don’t know if Paul Winfield [who wrote the headline] got in touch
with the New Yorker. They rarely run corrections because they so rarely
get things wrong, so I don’t think there was a correction on that. I
think there are some errors that are inevitable just because the
correction can’t come out until the mistake comes out in public. There
was no reason or way for deputy news editor Paul Winfield to announce
to the world that he wrote that headline.
You did go to great lengths in the book and, as far as I know,
corrections are basically unheard of in a book. (Email us if you know
of another book with corrections.) I’m wondering about your publisher’s
reaction to the source notes and if there was any push-back for the
transparency and then to add the corrections?
No…There certainly wasn’t any push-back from them on that. They were
great about the whole process because I made it clear from early on
that it was something I was committed to. I had a fairly compelling
argument, which was that this book was going to be examined with fine
toothed comb and it is in all of our best interests to go out of our
way.
On the corrections section there was no push-back. There might have been
some legal concerns about some of the language but we cleared that up
in like four minutes. I think some people [at Random House] felt I
wouldn’t be crucified for any of these errors so why not just fix them
and not worry about it. But part of what I wanted to do with the
corrections section was to convey the message that mistakes do happen.
There’s nothing to be inherently embarrassed about. If you took the
book as a whole — and I may be way off here — but I would argue that
it is as accurate as any similarly sized non-fiction book. If you
compared that to the number of mistakes in the similar number of words
in the New York Times, this is much fewer mistakes.
The interesting thing about that is the public editor of the Times just
did an interview with Allan M. Siegal [the paper's standards editor], and he said the Times is now averaging
about 10 corrections a day in the newspaper. In Kill Duck Before
Serving, the book about corrections at the Times, he says the paper
averages 138,000 words of news a weekday. I think you had about 10 or
11 corrections in the book and you wrote about hundred thousand words.
The Times has gotten much better about not viewing every correction as
an embarrassment…In a pre-Jayson Blair world, journalists for the most
part had the feeling that if you could talk someone out of asking
for/demanding a correction, that was a good thing. Corrections were
thought to say something bad about your skills as a reporter.
Certainly, if in every 20th story you file there are two or three,
there’s something wrong.
The flip side is journalists work in a very
fast paced industry with enormous amounts of pressure and lots of
deadlines.
But if the public can begin to feel that we’re not trying to
cover up our tracks, or trying to pretend we’re infallible, or trying
to hide our mistakes, they might be more willing to accept what we do
in its entirety.
We do have a pretty forgiving society. People do get a second chance. I
think that going beyond what most people see as necessary or
acceptable, as you’ve done, is where you get the benefit. It’s when you
take the step further that people start to appreciate it.
There were two ways I dug up corrections. One of them was by hearing
form people who wrote in, and the other was by sending out an email to
everyone I spoke with saying I was preparing the paperback edition and
want to make sure I got everything right…Most people responded by
saying it was a really positive step. Even people who were not crazy
about book appreciated that it was something I was willing to do.
Can corrections be an early indicator that something is wrong? For
example, in the book you mention the corrections for the Jayson Blair story about a September 11th
concert at Madison Square Garden. In reality, he actually didn’t go to the event to cover it and
so he got simple and obvious things very wrong.
That’s a good point. One of things I want to say is that we should
learn to be less ashamed of corrections. They obviously can serve as
good indicators of other things that might be going on. If you have a
reporter who is a really good reporter and seems to be doing a lot of
really enterprising work but that reporter keeps misspelling common
names, you can say to them: “One of the things you need to do is slow
down before you file. We’re a daily and we can’t fact check every story,
so go back and check every name.”
At the same time, if you have a story that necessitates a correction
where the reporter failed in their basic responsibility, then
something is going on there. By the same token, you don’t exile someone
to real estate because they misspelled the deputy borough president’s
name. If someone files a story and it turns out they were not actually
at the event they were writing about, that deserves more than a “buck
up try and harder next time.”
You can’t have a blanket policy on
corrections because not all corrections are created equal. I think the
Times did one good thing by breaking out the “For the Record” section
for names, dates etc. versus the more substantial “Corrections” that
impact the tenor and thrust of the story.
Do you think the average reader reads corrections?
No. Just like the average reader doesn’t read all the op-eds, there are
some who only read editorials or only do the crossword or only read
the business section. I know there are some people for whom the corrections
are the best read part of the paper. It’s never something I read and,
obviously, it’s something I’m pretty interested in. I almost never turn
to A2 and read the corrections, but I will definitely read an Editors
Note. Usually, the people who read corrections are the people who were
being written about or the people doing the writing.
It’s kind of like the old saying about a tree falling in the forest. If
the paper runs corrections and hardly anybody reads them, do the errors
actually get corrected?
Right. Over the history of journalism there have been a lot of different
efforts to figure out the best way to handle corrections. Should they
run in the same place that the story ran? Should they be on the bottom
of the front page, as opposed to the bottom of A2? Part of problem is
that it’s something we care about a lot more about than civilians. So
how do you do it in a way that doesn’t seem self important? Right now they
are handled the same every day and are easy to find, so it’s as good of
a solution as anything else.
One phenomenon today is that a paper can make an error and it gets
spread to other outlets right away. Have you seen examples when an
error gets passed though the media?
The one with Jim Roberts/Jon Landman. This is not in the slightest way
an excuse; it’s more an explanation of the phenomena…It was written in
New York magazine and then the next day the bloggers wrote, “Look how
dysfunctional the New York Times is, these two editors won’t even speak
to each other.” By the time I was writing the book, six months later,
you could Google that and get a hundred hits. It’s something that
happened in that case, and it happens all the time. It’s sort of like
putting the toothpaste back in the tube — it’s much harder to undo
something once it’s out there than to do it initially.
You mention in the book that Time and Newsweek eliminated their fact
checking departments. When you worked for Newsweek there was no fact
checking, so can you comment on the contrast when you went to Vanity
Fair?
Brills Content [where I worked before] had very extensive fact checking
and I’ve done a couple of Talk of the Town pieces over the last couple
years [for The New Yorker] and they have a pretty extensive fact
checking department. It wasn’t as if I was entering an environment [at
Vanity Fair] where I was experiencing fact checking for the first time.
One of the reasons why they were eliminated at newsweeklies was for
budget reasons. Another factor that makes it tricky for them is that their
metabolism is different from a monthly magazine or even the New Yorker,
which has a combination of feature writing and more topical writing.
When the shuttle goes down on a Saturday morning and they need to rip
up the issue and rewrite it by Saturday night, it’s hard to do the fact
checking.
I go back and forth on fact checking. I’m glad I’ve worked in
environments in which there is fact checking and environments where
there isn’t. For me, personally, if I had only worked professionally in
an environment with fact checking I would worry about whether that
would make me a lazier reporter in certain situations because of the
built in safety net.
Although there is a bit of shame in having a fact checker come to you
and say, “Look, I found about 20 errors in your piece that we need to
look at.”
There can be, but there can also be a situation where copy is handed in
at magazines where the story has a bunch of “TK”s and the assumption is
that the fact checker will go track those details down. No one wants to
have fact checker say, “He’s 52 not 54,” or “You spelled her name
wrong.” But it is a safety net.
The first news outlet I wrote for consistently was a daily newspaper
where there wasn’t any fact checking. I was mortified whenever I had a
correction and that helped teach me how to be a reporter and to get
things right the first time.
What’s the worst correction you’ve ever had?
This is a little bit of a cop out but it’s certainly the most frustrating one I’ve ever had.
I started out at the Palm Beach Post as a metro reporter
and a cop reporter. For the most part, you are not getting a lot of
front page stories [on those beats]. I had what I think was my first
front page story about a sculpture that was being moved down from
Canada and the municipal wrangling that was going on about it. It was
slated to run on the front page on Saturday.
I was waking up early on Saturday to go visit some friends in New York.
So I got up at 4 in the morning to go to the airport [and looked at the paper]. The story had
gone through a spellchecker and since it was about a sculpture from
Canada there were all these French Canadian words. The entire article
was gibberish. Every single name — not just the name of the sculpture,
but the name of the place it was coming from and everything — was just
tuned into gibberish. I say it’s a little bit of a cop out because it’s
not really my correction.
The Jon Landman/Jim Roberts correction in the book was also pretty bad,
especially because it furthered the notion that something can get out
there in the information current and just get repeated endlessly. It
was bad because they both spoke to me and had no real reason to. It
wasn’t a fun period in either of their lives. So that was pretty bad
and I know Jim was really frustrated about that, and understandably so.
I guess the good thing is that you did manage to get a fair amount of publicity for doing these corrections.
That was one of my goals. I was like, “Alright, I fucked up. What can I
do?” Hopefully, if the book gets adopted for courses, the paperback is
the one that they would pick. I wanted to get some attention to for
this outside of the people who read the book. That’s the reason I
posted the corrections section on my website. I didn’t want it to be a
situation where, if you had the hardcover, you’d have to buy the
paperback to find out what I got wrong.
If certainly seems as though you’ve gone beyond what anyone would have expected. It’s commendable in that respect.
Thank you, but hopefully that will be less and less true. Hopefully
people will begin to realize that there will never be a non-fiction
book that gets everything right. There’s nothing wrong with that as
long as you’re not willfully sloppy or lazy about it. There’s no reason
to go into a defensive crouch or try and cover up the situation.
