Tag Archives: delayed corrections

Delayed apologies, with damages

August 3, 2010 – 8:00 am

Thanks for being a regular reader. You can check out the award-winning Regret the Error book here.

OUR article of 9 October 2009 falsely alleged that throughout a 23 day hunger strike, Mr Parameswaran Subramanyam secretly ate takeaway burgers when dishonestly claiming he was on hunger strike in support of Sri Lankan Tamils, in a campaign which was policed at considerable expense and caused the police to waste public money.
We now accept that these allegations are totally untrue. Mr Subramanyam, whose sole aim has always been to promote the Tamil cause, did not eat any food at all during his hunger strike.
We apologise to Mr Subramanyam and his family for any upset and embarrassment caused and are paying him a substantial sum in damages. Link

And:

An article (9 October 2009), ‘Hunger striker’s £7m Big Mac’, reported claims that Mr Subramanyam was caught secretly eating burgers while on hunger strike during the Tamil protest in London, wasting significant police costs. We now accept that there was no truth in these allegations and we and other media have agreed to pay him damages and have apologised to Mr Subramanyam for the distress and embarrassment caused. Link

Thanks, Jamie!

By Craig Silverman | Posted in Newspapers | Also tagged , , , | View Comments

Delayed apology

July 12, 2010 – 8:00 am

In an article published on this website on 27 December 2009 until 15 January 2010, entitled “Jet bomb ordered by 9/11 spiritual leader”, we incorrectly described the charity Interpal as “Hamas-supporting”.
As such the article would have wrongly been understood to mean that Interpal and its trustees provided support for Hamas notwithstanding that Hamas is deemed a terrorist organisation and thereby were aiding terrorism.
We accept that this is wrong and neither Interpal nor its Trustees support Hamas.
We wish to apologise to Interpal and its Trustees and are happy to set the record straight. Link

Thanks, Jamie!

By Craig Silverman | Posted in Major Errors, Newspapers | Also tagged , , , | View Comments

Wash. Post ombud calls for better error reporting tools/process

June 21, 2010 – 8:00 am

Washington Post ombudsman Andrew Alexander continues to beaver away on the corrections beat. (See some of his previous work here.) Yesterday’s column looked at the paper’s less than effective process for enabling readers to report errors:

… Many readers have also complained that the Web site doesn’t offer an effortless way to report journalistic errors. They’re right. A small “corrections” link appears under the site’s “News” section. But it provides only an address for e-mailing correction requests (corrections@washpost.com), or encourages readers to phone The Post’s main number and “ask to be connected to the desk involved.” Many have told me the process is simply too cumbersome.

When readers somehow manage to get a message to The Post’s Universal Desk, which processes all print and Web content, editors are quick to correct obvious errors online. But requests submitted through the normal e-mail address can linger for days before a decision is made on whether a correction should appear in the paper, which would automatically trigger a correction online. In an era when inaccurate information can go viral, that delay is unacceptable.

Senior Editor Milton Coleman, who oversees corrections, acknowledged the problem and said a remedy is in the works to “streamline” the process so that “many, if not most, corrections will be made online before we make them in the newspaper.” The Post also should consider providing online readers with a more prominent link to report errors or technical glitches. Editors could be immediately alerted if every page on the site clearly displayed a link urging readers to “Report problems on this page.” Raju Narisetti, the managing editor who oversees The Post’s online operations, said ideas such as these are being considered as part of a Web site redesign that is underway. He said a recent spike in reader complaints might be due partly to a “significant uptick” in online traffic. Replacing “aging technology” and redesigning the site “should help reduce the current dissonance,” he added.

I also dedicated a recent edition of my weekly Columbia Journalism Review column to the issue of corrections reporting.

Thanks, Daniel!

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Editors’ note

May 27, 2010 – 8:00 am

An article on Sept. 3, 2009, recounted the prosecution of a gang that robbed a Baghdad bank and killed eight bank guards in July 2009. The article reported that testimony at the trial “established” that five of the nine accused were in Vice President Adel Abdul Mahdi’s bodyguard battalion. While it was undisputed that two of the nine accused were in his bodyguard battalion (one of whom was acquitted), the identities of the others remained a subject of dispute. Some evidence suggested that two were not security officials and that the others had worked in security in the neighborhood but were not assigned to Mr. Abdul Mahdi’s battalion at the time of the incident.

Similarly, the article reported that the gang “forgot about the security cameras” and “they forgot about sunrise, which came before they finished.” The article should have noted that there was evidence that the cameras were not operational at the time of the robbery and that the gang had escaped before dawn. Finally, the article misidentified one of the accused men, Ahmad Khalaf Dhamad, as Ahmed Khalid. Link

By Craig Silverman | Posted in Newspapers | Also tagged | View Comments

News orgs still making it difficult for people to get corrections

May 25, 2010 – 8:00 am

I previously wrote about MediaBugs, a Knight Foundation-funded project that I’m occasionally helping out as an unpaid advisor. It’s been up and running for a few weeks and the people running it — Scott Rosenberg and Mark Follman — are coming to grips with the challenge of finding the right person to listen to a request for correction.

Here’s an excerpt of a recent blog post from Rosenberg:

One of the early field results of the MediaBugs experiment is a simple one. It turns out that, in the case of many news organizations, including some pretty prominent ones, just figuring out how to tell the newsroom that there’s a problem requires persistence and stamina.

Consider this anonymous error report we received at MediaBugs a few days ago. It said that the Wall Street Journal, in a recent book review, had misspelled the name of the author being reviewed. The book is Mac McClelland’s For Us Surrender Is Out of the Question. The Journal spelled her name “McLelland.” (The publisher’s page listing the book, which I’ll take as an authoritative source, spells it with the extra “c.”) …

Rosenberg then spends several paragraphs detailing the process he undertook to pursue this correction. Imagine how many people would have abandoned their quest for correction after the first few minutes of trying. (Most of them, if you ask me.) Writes Rosenberg:

I went to these lengths because, right now, this is my work. But we shouldn’t have any illusions about normal members of the public. They won’t jump through these hoops. They will conclude — rightly or wrongly but very understandably, either way — that the newsroom doesn’t actually care about hearing about its mistakes.

Now here’s the beginning of a new post from Follman:

Recently a MediaBugs user reported that an Associated Press story had misidentified the “Seinfeld” character George Costanza as Jerry’s “neighbor” on the show. Eventually the AP’s west coast entertainment editor, Steve Loeper, responded to an inquiry about the matter, and the AP subsequently decided to publish a correction.

It was a positive outcome, but here’s the rub: Getting to it involved no less than contacting five different people, sending eight emails and making three phone calls — and it took more than three weeks to get a result.

I suspect the MediaBugs team will continue to encounter this kind of disorganization and lack of accountability. As Rosenberg wrote, “If we want to understand why people don’t trust the media, this might be a very good place to start.”

It also helps explain why the number of published corrections is tiny when compared with the actual number of errors.

By Craig Silverman | Posted in Behind the scenes, Newspapers, Regret Articles, Wire service | Also tagged , , | View Comments

Wash. Post ombud reports progress in handling of corrections

May 19, 2010 – 8:00 am

Andrew Alexander, the Washington Post’s ombudsman, is doing a good job on the corrections beat at the paper. Last year, he wrote two columns about the paper’s problems with handling corrections requests (1,2). (See my previous post here.) Yesterday, he followed up with a blog post that includes some good news, along with details about areas that still require improvement. The good news:

… The Post has reversed its embarrassing inattention to correction requests. Since my initial column, section editors have received regular reminders about correction requests that have been pending for more than 14 days. Where a backlog of several hundred neglected requests once existed, the number now is only four. The database shows a handful of other pending requests that are being addressed and corrections likely will appear soon.

Following publication of my first column on March 22 of last year, Assistant Managing Editor Peter Perl successfully pushed the newsroom to whittle down the huge backlog of requests. The task of riding herd on corrections was subsequently passed to Senior Editor Milton Coleman, who started another push several months ago …

Coleman credited two veteran Post copy editors, Bill Walsh and Martha Murdock, with improving corrections to make them “more fulsome, clearer and more transparent.” That’s helpful to readers, who in the past often complained about Post corrections that made it impossible to know the original error.

Where the paper still needs to improve:

Readers periodically complain that their requests for corrections, typically e-mailed to corrections@washpost.com, are never acknowledged. And sometimes it takes too long to run a correction that should have appeared within days.

By Craig Silverman | Posted in Newspapers, Ombudsmen | Also tagged , , | View Comments

AP goes the extra mile to correct decades-old photo caption

March 18, 2010 – 8:53 pm

This is a nice story from AP about how the news organization worked hard to correct a photo caption on an important photo:

For 68 years, John E. Love has been haunted by memories of being forced to carry the bodies of fallen comrades to a mass grave hollowed out of a Filipino rice field. Now, at last, a bit of history is being rewritten because of those memories.

After six months of research, The Associated Press this week is correcting the caption on one of the most famous photos in its library, 65 years after the image first moved on the newswire. The image shows defeated Allied soldiers after their surrender to Japanese forces on the Philippines’ Bataan Peninsula in April 1942.

Over the years, the photo — which shows a procession of men walking down a dirt road, bearing bodies in blankets hung from bamboo poles — has become perhaps the most widely published image of what came to be known as the Bataan Death March.

But for many of those years, Love, a native of Albuquerque, N.M., who fought to defend Bataan as a 19-year-old Army corporal, saw captions paired with the photo that he believed did a disservice to the truth.

Last August, Love picked up the Albuquerque Journal and saw the photo again, together with a front-page story about Bataan survivors. He called the newspaper and told an editor the caption was wrong. It described the scene as part of the infamous Death March, a forced six-day march by Japanese captors of 12,000 Americans and more than 66,000 Filipino prisoners across the peninsula. Thousands died in the march, suffering from lack of food, water and medical treatment.

“That picture is not of the Death March,” says Love, now 87. “The Japanese would not have tolerated a bunch of slow marching guys carrying their own dead. They wouldn’t have tolerated it just one New York minute.”

A Journal reporter, Charles D. Brunt, found other local Bataan survivors who agreed, wrote a story about the conflicting information and contacted AP, the source of both the photo and the caption. That launched the cooperative’s own investigation of the photo, originally supplied to news services by the U.S. military after it was confiscated from defeated Japanese forces.

Deep in the AP library of millions of photos, the caption filed with a negative in 1945 identified the image as showing U.S. and Filipino forces carrying war casualties as they neared the end of the death march and approached Camp O’Donnell, where prisoners of war were held.

AP archivists contacted the Pentagon. Eventually, that led to the original photograph, on file in the National Archives in Washington, D.C. The catalog recorded it as a photo of American prisoners using improvised litters to carry comrades. But a note filed along with the image, date unknown, said that, according to a retired U.S. Army colonel, the photo was not of the death march, but of the burial detail in the weeks that followed.

That’s exactly the way Love had long recalled it.

“We rounded up bamboo poles … and we confiscated what blankets we could from the incoming prisoners. We told them we had to have them. The guys were dying faster than we could dig graves or carry them,” Love said. “We carried them 1,000 yards and we would just unload the blankets there and the guys would fall out into the graves. I did that every day until the late hours of the evening for six weeks.”

After discussing the evidence, AP decided to correct the caption. It now reads, in part, “At the time of its release, this photo was identified as dead and wounded being carried by fellow prisoners during the Bataan Death March in April 1942 … Subsequent information from military archivists, the National Archives and Records Administration, and surviving prisoners, strongly suggests that this photo may actually depict a burial detail at Camp O’Donnell.”

It is rare for the news service to correct the information filed with a historical photo, said Valerie Komor, director of the AP Corporate Archives. There are many images in storage, and any individual photograph is likely to be re-examined only if someone calls it into question. But that does not mean the first draft of history cannot be rewritten …

By Craig Silverman | Posted in Behind the scenes, Wire service | Also tagged , | View Comments

Fuzzy Finnish numbers

February 2, 2010 – 8:00 am

In the original version of this story we said that 10 million Finns died under Lenin in the 1917 civil war. The correct figure is 37,000. We regret the error. Link

The above is a hard-fought correction. The magazine, a Canadian weekly, initially published a letter pointing out the mistake, but declined to issue a correction. Carol Wainio, who has been spotting errors in Canadian media for a while, stayed on the case and was recently rewarded with a correction. It also helped that a Finnish paper mocked Maclean’s for its mistake.

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Three years later, an apology

January 4, 2010 – 8:00 am

The Globe and Mail and Jan Wong did not intend to identify the owners of a Thornhill home whose home was described in the Maid for a Month series in 2006, and apologizes for any harm that may have been caused by the publication of the article to Steven, Georgina and Angelo Nitsopoulos. Link

This is the offending article.

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It’s the system, man: Wash. Post ombud decries slow pace of corrections

December 8, 2009 – 8:00 am

washpost4Andrew Alexander, the Washington Post’s ombudsman, dedicated his weekend column to the issue of corrections. Back in March, he blew the whistle on the fact that the paper’s corrections policy and procedures were failing readers.

Sunday’s column is something of a follow up. It also revealed that at the end of November the Post had published “about 950 corrections” this year. Alexander began by explaining that the Post often takes weeks or months to publish corrections:

The Post’s internal policies say that when readers point out mistakes, the response should be “prompt.” But too often, reporters and editors move at a snail’s pace to correct errors.

Despite improvement, an analysis of Post corrections this year showed that reported errors routinely went uncorrected for weeks or even months. Many were indisputable and should have been corrected in the following day’s paper.

In the Internet age, this kind of tardiness can be especially damaging. The longer inaccurate information lives on, the greater the risk that it will spread far beyond The Post’s readership. Dawdling on errors also weakens the bond of trust with readers who took the trouble to report them. They become justifiably cynical about The Post’s commitment to accuracy.

Alexander is on point with his criticism. Corrections should not take weeks or months to appear. He cited several examples where the paper dragged its feet. Even more interestingly, he provided a bit of an insider’s view as to how the paper’s corrections process is supposed to work:

Each month, corrections “monitors” in Post news departments are e-mailed a statistical analysis of pending and approved requests. It arrives with a standard admonishment: “It is very important that monitors handle correction requests in a timely fashion.”

Rather than emailing this to the appointed monitors once a month, why doesn’t the paper create an internal corrections-request tracking system that’s similar to software bug trackers? (I’m an unpaid advisor to MediaBugs, a Knight Foundation-funded project aiming to build something along these lines, albeit for public, rather than internal, use.) A system like this could provide automated alerts that make sure the monitors know when they’re falling behind. Also, the senior editorial people responsible for tracking corrections would be able to see which requests are still in the queue. An email once a month simply isn’t enough.

That said, a Post senior editor also raised a few other issues:

Senior Editor Milton Coleman said that an increased workload for editors, coupled with organizational changes and the temporary relocation of staffers during a months-long newsroom renovation, have caused “large gaps” in the corrections process.

But ultimately, he said, the remedy is that “someone has to be tasked with following up on a regular basis” to see that correction requests are being quickly handled.

These are valid problems, but there’s a larger point here: the Post’s internal corrections process isn’t scalable or adaptable. Some staffers get laid off, take buyouts or are reassigned, and the whole thing grinds to a near-halt. That’s not a good system.

Coleman told Alexander that’s he’s been tasked with helping improve the way things work. I suggest he step back from the micro-level issues and examine whether the paper could create a new, scalable process that enforces a higher level of accountability.

Crack the whip on people all you want, but I think the Post’s system/process, or lack thereof, is failing the paper.

By Craig Silverman | Posted in Behind the scenes, Newspapers, Ombudsmen, Regret Articles | Also tagged , , , | View Comments

Two years later, we’re sorry about saying you ran a cult

September 16, 2009 – 9:25 am

dailymailAn article on May 25, 2007, ‘The Cult Guru Who Stole My Son’ made claims that William Van Gordon was a ‘brainwashed zombie’ and Edo Shonin brainwashed him and that the Buddhist retreat which they ran was a cult. We accept this is untrue. We apologise to both men for the contrary impression given. Link

Thanks, @Lucie_M!

By Craig Silverman | Posted in Major Errors, Newspapers | Also tagged , , , | View Comments

The misquote that defies defeat cont.

August 27, 2009 – 8:00 am

latimesHamas-Israel negotiations: An Op-Ed article titled "Can Hamas Cut a Deal for Peace?," which was published on June 17, 2003, paraphrased and partially quoted former Israeli army Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Moshe Yaalon as having "talked of rubbing in the fact that the Palestinians are ‘a defeated people.’ " The Times was recently made aware of questions regarding the source and accuracy of this material. The Times has been unable to verify that Yaalon expressed the thought or used the quoted words. The quote and the paraphrase should not have been used.

Background here.

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A timely Times correction from 1969

July 20, 2009 – 8:40 pm

Earlier today, Mathew Ingram, communities editor of the Globe And Mail, sent out this tweet:

ingramtweet

He was referring to this notable Times correction from July 17, 1969:

spacecorrection

 

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CJR column: The NYT policy for correcting older articles

March 13, 2009 – 12:48 pm

cjrMy CJR online column for this week uses a very delayed correction from the New York Times to examine the paper’s policy for correcting its archives. An excerpt is below. Click the headline for the full text.

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 …

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NYT corrects article from 1906

March 12, 2009 – 8:00 am

nytbanner1An article on April 30, 1906, about a New York watch repairer, Jonathan Dillon, who recalled secretly inscribing Abraham Lincoln’s watch while working on it in a Washington jewelry store in 1861, misstated part of the inscription, using information from Mr. Dillon (who the article noted had, at 84, “a remarkable memory.”) The inscription reads:
“Jonathan Dillon April 13- 1861 Fort Sumpter was attacked by the rebels on the above date J Dillon. April 13- 1861 Washington thank God we have a government Jonth Dillon.”
The inscription does not say, as Mr. Dillon recalled in 1906: “The first gun is fired. Slavery is dead. Thank God we have a President who at least will try.” (Besides misspelling Sumter, Mr. Dillon also inscribed the wrong date. The opening shot of the Civil War was on April 12.)
An article about the watch, which the Smithsonian opened on Tuesday to settle decades-long speculation about the inscription, is on Page C1. Link

Here are a few more Times corrections to archival stories: 1,2, 3. The paper publishes more corrections to old stories than any other news organization, partly due to its online archives.

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48 years later, a correction

August 13, 2008 – 8:00 am

A listing of credits on April 28, 1960, with a theater review of “West Side Story” on its return to the Winter Garden theater, misstated the surname of the actor who played Action. He is George Liker, not Johnson. (Mr. Liker, who hopes to audition for a role in a Broadway revival of the show planned for February, brought the error to The Times’s attention last month.) Link

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McCain demoted by delayed Times correction

August 13, 2008 – 8:00 am

An article on Sunday about Senator John McCain’s campaign management style described his role as a Navy pilot in Vietnam incorrectly. He flew bombing missions as an attack aircraft pilot, but he was not a “fighter pilot.” (The error has appeared in numerous other Times articles the past dozen years, most recently on April 9 and on Dec. 15, 2007.) Link

Gawker has some background on this.

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Three years later, a correction

June 13, 2008 – 8:00 am

Because of an editing error, an article on May 2, 2005, about the suggestion by Jeff Van Gundy, the coach of the Houston Rockets at the time, that fouls were being called more readily and unfairly on his team’s center, Yao Ming, during the N.B.A. playoffs referred incorrectly to the genesis of Van Gundy’s concern. He said it was “an official” — not a referee — who had called him to say that Yao was being singled out in games against the Dallas Mavericks. Van Gundy was fined $100,000 by the league for his comments. Link

The error was repeated in a follow-up article in 2005 and again on Wednesday in an article about Tim Donaghy, a former referee who has pleaded guilty after being charged last year with conspiring with gamblers. In a court filing to seek leniency at sentencing, Donaghy and his lawyer cited the Van Gundy controversy among accusations of misconduct and manipulation of game results by N.B.A. executives and referees. Discussing the Donaghy case on a broadcast on Wednesday night, Van Gundy, now a television analyst, said he had been called by an N.B.A. official in 2005. Link

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One from the archives

January 28, 2008 – 8:00 am

An obituary on July 11, 1995, about Nevitt Sanford, a psychologist who developed scientific methods to study prejudice and hatred, misidentified the institution where he studied as an undergraduate. It was the University of Richmond, not the University of Virginia. The error was pointed out in an e-mail message this week from a college instructor who used the article for a class. Link

By Craig Silverman | Posted in Newspapers | Also tagged | View Comments

Delayed arrival

November 1, 2007 – 8:00 am

An article on Dec. 7, 2005, about the wine shop Sherry-Lehmann and its training of part-time workers for the Christmas season, referred incorrectly to the family of the owner, Michael Aaron, who commented on handing off the company to the next generation. Mr. Aaron has a son, Alexander; he is not childless. The error was pointed out to the reporter a few months after the article ran, but because of a misunderstanding, no correction was published. Lawyers for Alexander Aaron requested a correction in April, but their letter went astray at The Times. Editors received another request last week. Link

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A tale of error and correction that began in 1994

October 18, 2007 – 8:00 am

An article on July 5, 1994, about James B. Blair, then the general
counsel for the Tyson Foods company and a longtime confidant and
personal emissary for Bill and Hillary Clinton, misstated benefits that
Tyson received from the state of Arkansas while Mr. Clinton was
governor. Although the company did benefit from at least $7 million in
state tax credits, it did not receive $9 million in loans from the
state. (The error appeared in three other articles and in an editorial
in 1994, all of which were corrected on April 20 of that year. The
correction should have been appended then in The Times’s archives to
those articles: one on the front page on March 18 about Mrs. Clinton’s
commodity trades in the late 1970s; a March 19 article about President
Clinton’s defense of Mrs. Clinton’s investments; a March 30 article
about the White House’s disclosure of the amount Mrs. Clinton invested
in commodities trades, and a March 31 editorial.)
The error in
the July 5 article was discovered during research after the watchdog
group Media Matters twice pointed out that the 1994 correction had not
been appended to the other articles. Link

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