A few hours before I received my award from the National Press Club in Washington, I paid a visit to the Newseum. It’s housed in a lovely new building, but I mostly cared about the bathrooms.
As was the case at its old location, the Newseum bathroom walls are covered in corrections, errors and other press flubs. As soon as I arrived, producer Ken Crawford took me into a bathroom. Some shots from the bathrooms are at the bottom of this post (I’m told the male and female washrooms have the same content), and you can view all of my Newseum photos here. You can also go there to view the larger versions.
Aside from the bathrooms, I was happy to see the Newseum offer additional accuracy-related content. Crawford created an eight-minute video, “Getting it Right,” that looks at the coverage of the 2000 U.S. election, the case of Richard Jewell, and examines why errors occur (carelessness, deception etc.), among other topics. It’s an interesting introduction to the issue. The same theatre also shows a short film about bias. After it finished, the man sitting behind me said, “That was a biased look at the issue of bias.”
The Newseum also has a display devoted to errors and corrections. It includes that famous front page Lexington-Herald clarification from 2004:
A brief word about corrections:
A look at the Sago disaster:
How mistakes are made:
The obligatory (and, sorry, blurry) Dewey Defeats Truman image:
Two more famous errors (I know, I’m not much of a photographer):
On trust:
Bias:
Newseum Bathroom Photos
This is the introductory text in the bathroom:
A bathroom correction and some other errors:
One final note: the Newseum’s entrance has a large ticker featuring the latest headlines from AP. I couldn’t help but chuckle when I spotted a typo scrolling by. Sorry, no photo.
8 Comments
In this country, “theater” is not spelled “theatre.” “Theatre” is spelled that way in England and in The New Yorker.
Yes, that’s my Canadian educational background coming through. We love our “u”s and “re”s. Do me a favour and count me amoung the forgiven.
My favorite headline back in my weekly newspaper editing days was “Prominent Waterville (Maine) doctor dies at 69.”
I clipped it out and pasted it up in the production room with a note: What a way to go!
I attended college in England and recall this headline in, I believe, the Oxford Gazette: “Churchill in Bed With Coed”. I don’t think it brought snickers to Brit readers since “coed” was not in their slang vocabulary–at least in the early 1950s.
Correction on my earlier post: I think the “Churchill coed” headline was in the Oxford Mail–not Oxford Gazette.
One of my favourite — completely accurate — headlines, was in a local paper in Devon, circa 1978, on a story about a man caught stealing from a butchers shop:
Bulge in
trousers
was pound
of sausages,
court told
Sterling: What was the “innocent” interpretation of the Oxford Mail headline?
Joshua: The innocent interpretation becomes clear on learning The Oxford Mail headline was a typo. It was supposed to read “Churchill in Bed With Cold.”
2 Trackbacks
[...] in Washington on Monday. I spent the morning at the Newseum, and you can read my report about it here. I also had lunch with Slate’s Jack [...]
[...] autor de Regret the Error se ha dado una vuelta por el Newseum, el museo dedicado al periodismo que tuvo la feliz idea de decorar los baños con [...]