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.

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 he’d just published about his son’s 20-year prison sentence. The moment host Dave Iverson completed his introduction about the politically and emotionally charged case, Lindh cut in: "Can I add a really important correction to what you just said?"

Iverson had just described John Walker Lindh’s 2002 guilty plea as "one count of providing services to a terrorist organization." That, Frank Lindh said, was simply wrong.

Yes, his son had pled guilty to providing services to the Taliban, in whose army he had enlisted. Doing so was a crime because the Taliban government was under U.S. economic sanctions for harboring Al Qaeda. But the Taliban was not (and has never been) classified by the U.S. government as a terrorist organization itself.

This distinction might seem picayune. But it cut to the heart of the disagreement between Americans who have viewed John Walker Lindh as a traitor and a terrorist and those, like his father, who believe he was a fervent Muslim who never intended to take up arms against his own country.

That morning, the clash over this one fact set host and guest on a collision course for the remainder of the 30-minute interview. The next day, KQED ran a half-hour Forum segment apologizing for the mess and picking over its own mistakes.

KQED’s on-air fiasco didn’t happen randomly or spontaneously. The collision was set in motion nine years before by 14 erroneous words in the New York Times.

This is the story of how that error was made, why it mattered, why it hasn’t been properly corrected to this day — and what lessons it offers about how newsroom traditions of verification and correction must evolve in the digital age…

– via “Corrections in the Web Age: The Case of the New York Times’ Terror Error,” a great piece by Scott Rosenberg and Mark Follman of MediaBugs. A must read.

… 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 that in Angela Pearman’s case the allegation wasn’t accurate. She had interviewed John Lombard by telephone earlier that day. Her questions and his answers were recorded simultaneously in Sydney and Moscow and later edited together. Ms Pearman did not, as Media Watch alleged, deceive her audience.
Our belated apologies – better, I hope, late than never.

Via Stinky Journalism.

From a report by AFP:

During the late Serbian strongman Slobodan Milosevic’s decade-long rule, RTS was known for its unwavering loyalty to his regime, often labelling his opponents “traitors” or “Western-paid mercenaries”.

The board “apologises to the citizens of Serbia and of neighbouring states who have been the object of insults, slanders and contents that can be nowadays seen as a hate speech,” said the statement published on the RTS website.
The content of RTS programmes was deliberately designed to discredit the Serbian opposition and its leaders “as a part of the undemocratic regime’s propaganda,” said the board.

I’ve been cataloguing delayed apologies since the day I launched this site. This delayed apology from the Lexington Herald-Leader was among my first posts:

It has come to the editor’s attention that the Herald-Leader neglected to cover the civil rights movement. We regret the omission.

For other delayed apologies, see these from two North Carolina newspapers (almost 120 years after the fact), and this from the Tallahassee Democrat.

Thanks, Matt!

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.

“It’s a tad late” to bring them up, said Dr. Schwenk, who found the obituary online.

But it is never too late to set the record straight. If journalism is indeed the first rough draft of history, there is always time to revise, polish and perfect, even if pinning down the details about Lieutenant Schwenk after so many years turned out to be less than straightforward.

A reporter’s attempts at fact-checking led to some unexpected twists and some head-scratching moments about seemingly basic elements of his life, such as when he entered the United States Naval Academy — and when he graduated.

– via Getting Lt. Schwenk’s Story Right, 112 Years Later, a fascinating story from the New York Times.

Hat tip to Romenesko.

Here’s the apology:

ABC News apologizes for any harm caused to you as a result of its broadcast of a video clip that ABC News stated was of you speaking about yourself when in fact you were talking about a hypothetical person. ABC News regrets that it did not conduct sufficient investigation of the clip after receiving it to establish its correct context. By presenting the footage out of context, ABC News misled its audience and failed to meet its own standards, which ABC deeply regrets.

Adds Gawker:

20/20 made an on-air apology shortly after the episode aired. But today, to settle a legal challenge from Price, ABC News issued a written statement apologizing for the segment and acknowledging that the piece “misled its audience and failed to meet its own standards.”

A press release about the apology was issued by Dr. Price, and it included this quote from his daughter:

Watching the ABC story was really devastating to our family and our church. We couldn’t believe that such a highly respected company as ABC News would do such a thing. It was a long time coming, but we are happy and grateful that ABC has finally acknowledged that it misled its audience and that it failed to meet its own standards.

In late November, I asked Rep. Darrell Issa’s spokesman, Kurt Bardella, for an interview with the congressman. He said he would see what he could do.

That afternoon my phone rang, I heard the words “Darrell Issa” and I thanked the congressman for calling. I asked why “you” made various statements about the president and congressional oversight, and he responded. I called him “Congressman” several times during our discussion. I later emailed Bardella, on Nov. 24, and said: “Hey, thanks for getting me the congressman so quickly. He mentioned the minority having sent 46 letters to the chairman or subcommittee chairmen and getting only six responses. Would you have some or all of the ones that drew no response? Thanks.”

Bardella sent the followup information I requested.

On Nov. 29, after my story ran on The Daily Beast, I got a note from Bardella saying there had been “a little confusion” and “it wasn’t the congressman you spoke with, it was me speaking in his capacity as his spokesman.”

To which Gawker's Hamilton Nolan asked:

That's a pretty insane error. But even insane errors can and will happen to every reporter, if they keep at it long enough. The real question here: Bardella apparently told Kurtz of the error on Nov. 29. Today is January 12, of the following year. Why the delay? It's hard to think of a real good reason a reporter would sit on a fairly major, embarrassing correction for well more than a month. We've emailed TDB's spokesperson, and we'll update if we get an explanation.

Kurtz offered an explanation to Politico:

"What made me realize that I should have dealt with this at the time, and I am kicking myself over that, was a call from Ryan Lizza at the New Yorker who had apparently gotten wind of the ‘confusion' from Bardella," he said, explaining that Lizza was working on a piece about Issa. "And then I did what I should have done immediately, which was just lay it all out."

That's not an acceptable explanation from Kurtz. The fact that he only corrected the piece after a reporter asked him about it suggests Kurtz had no intention of fixing and acknowledging his error.

He corrected because he got caught.

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!

Thanks, Jamie!

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

Thanks, Daniel!

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

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.

… 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.

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 …