An article on Thursday about a push to ban horse-drawn carriage rides in Central Park misstated part of the name of an organization to which an upstate New York veterinarian belongs, and it described the carriages incorrectly at one point. The veterinarian, Dr. Nena Winand, is a member of the American Association of Equine Practitioners, [...]
Thirty years ago, a cub reporter for the New York Times was given his first assignment: “to cover the failure of the old transmitter of Columbia University’s radio station, WKCR-FM, which was then perched on 515 Madison Avenue, at 53rd Street.” David W. Dunlap was brought back to the memory of that first Times byline [...]
It is hard to describe the interview that took place on KQED’s Forum show on May 25, 2011, as anything other than a train wreck. Osama bin Laden was dead, and Frank Lindh — father of John Walker Lindh, the "American Taliban" — had been invited on to discuss a New York Times op-ed piece [...]
From the Australian Broadcast Corporation’s Media Watch program: … Media Watch accused Sydney newsreader Angela Pearman, and several other ABC newsreaders around the country, of faking that interview with John Lombard in Moscow. The allegation was repeated in our 20th anniversary special in 2009 and was until recently available on our website. We’re now satisfied [...]
During the 1990s conflict in the Balkans, Serbian state broadcaster Radio Televizija Srbi (RTS) was basically transformed into a propaganda outlet. In order to try and repair the damage, the organization issued an apology on Monday. An excerpt: During the unfortunate events of the 1990s, Radio-Television Belgrade and Radio-Television Serbia in many instances in their [...]
This just in: Lt. M. K. Schwenk’s first name was Milton, not Melton, as his obituary said. In 1899. His great-nephew, Dr. Daniel A. F. Schwenk, a retired dentist from Walpole, N.H., wrote to The Times last month, pointing out what he said were several errors in the 264-word obituary published on June 29, 1899. [...]
From the Los Angeles Times: Four years after airing a misleading video segment about Crenshaw Christian Center founder Dr. Frederick K.C. Price, ABC News has issued a public apology. In a story called “Enough!” that aired on ABC’s “20/20″ and “Good Morning America” in March 2007, ABC News and then-correspondent John Stossel investigated whether ministers [...]
Daily Beast Washington bureau chief and former Washington Post media columnist Howard Kurtz recently added a rather important correction to a story of his that was published back in November. (Not that it's labeled as a correction on the story…) Here's an excerpt from a post by Kurtz that explains the nature of the error: [...]
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 [...]
In an article published on this website on 27 December 2009 until 15 January 2010, entitled “Jet bomb ordered by 9/11 spiritual leaderâ€, we incorrectly described the charity Interpal as “Hamas-supportingâ€. As such the article would have wrongly been understood to mean that Interpal and its trustees provided support for Hamas notwithstanding that Hamas is [...]
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. [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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. [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
Andrew 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 [...]
An 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 [...]
Hamas-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 [...]
Earlier today, Mathew Ingram, communities editor of the Globe And Mail, sent out this tweet: He was referring to this notable Times correction from July 17, 1969: Report an error
My 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 [...]
An 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.â€) The inscription reads: [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
