Regret the Error » errors of omission

Missed a few

Craig Silverman — Mon, 13 Jun 2011 13:00:16 +0000

Who can give blood? asked a Q&A – and summarised the answer as: Anyone who is fit and well and over the age of 17 – as long as they are not pregnant, do not weigh less than 50kg and have not had a tattoo or piercing, or had jaundice in the past six months. Also mentioned were some restrictions if a potential donor had lately travelled to certain parts of the world, or was taking certain types of medication. However, owing to some miscommunication, other significant exclusions were unintentionally omitted. The NHS Blood and Transplant authority’s explanatory document says, for instance, you should never give blood if you have ever had syphilis, HTLV (Human T-lymphotropic virus), or hepatitis B or C; you’re a man who’s had sex with another man, even using a condom; you’ve ever worked as a prostitute; you’ve ever injected yourself with drugs (Donating blood, 7 June, page 15, G2). Link

Rest is fine

Craig Silverman — Mon, 01 Nov 2010 12:00:11 +0000

In an Oct. 27 story about jailed financier R. Allen Stanford's legal representation in his criminal case, The Associated Press reported that Stanford had written a letter in August accusing his attorney, Bob Bennett, of ethical misconduct.

The story should have included that Stanford had also filed court documents after having written the August letter in which he said that he found Bennett to be truthful and honest and that Bennett had performed honorably as his attorney.

The story also did not make clear the reason for the Oct. 27 hearing, which was the subject of the AP story, in which the August allegations against Bennett were referred to. The hearing was called because Stanford was applying for assistance from the federal government to pay for his legal defense as he was now considered indigent. During the hearing, Bennett withdrew his application to be appointed by the court and paid by the federal government. The judge at the hearing kept Bennett on the case to assist Stanford's new attorneys but ordered that Bennett have no further contact with Stanford.

The story also did not include that Bennett is still Stanford's attorney of record on a separate civil lawsuit related to the payment of legal fees in the case. Link

Hellish for reasons left unsaid

Craig Silverman — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 13:00:32 +0000

IN her letter published in the Echo last Friday, Mrs Marion Smith talked about the loss of her husband after 58 years of marriage and the importance of a supportive, loving family.
She said “his life was hell and his death released him from it”. In preparing the letter for publication, we edited out the fact that Mrs Smith’s husband had suffered from Alzheimer’s in later years. We are happy to clarify this point. Link

Right of reply

Craig Silverman — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 12:00:45 +0000

A Feb. 16 Page One article that dealt with the case of Guantanamo Bay detainee Mohammed Sulaymon Barre quoted a hearing transcript in which an officer at the detention facility said he believed that Dahabshiil, a money-transfer company employing Barre, “was used to transfer money for terrorism.” The article pointed out that the allegations involving Dahabshiil were later dropped from the government’s summary of evidence. After publication, an attorney for Dahabshiil said in a letter to The Post that the firm has “never been the subject of any investigation in relation to alleged terrorist funding” and that it “has no involvement whatsoever with money laundering or the funding of terrorist organizations and . . . places the highest importance on money laundering compliance.” Dahabshiil should have been given an opportunity to comment for the article. Link

Unfortunate error in AP’s Novak retirement story

Craig Silverman — Mon, 04 Aug 2008 19:07:50 +0000

The news broke today that columnist Robert Novak, who recently revealed that he has a brain tumor, is retiring. Many news organizations are carrying a corrected version of an AP story. The early version of it suffered from a rather unfortunate omission in the second sentence of the last paragraph:

AP apparently caught the error shortly after moving the story. The above screenshot is taken from the website of WCTV. As of now, the story is still uncorrected. The early version also made its way onto other sites, as this Google search shows:

Paris-Match magazine goof angers Quebec City

Craig Silverman — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 12:00:51 +0000

This year is the 400th anniversary of Quebec City. It’s a big deal for the city, and French magazine Paris-Match decided to dedicate a recent issue to the celebration. Unfortunately, its editors were under the impression that it was the province of Quebec’s 400th anniversary. Quebec City barely earned a mention in the issue. Folks here in Montreal are amused by the error, while those in Quebec City are less than impressed. From a recent story that appeared in The Gazette, an English daily in Montreal:

A leading French magazine’s special edition on Quebec’s 400th anniversary confused the founding of the city with that of the province. Even though the story should have been about Quebec City’s 400th birthday, the 30-page special doesn’t have a line about it.

Instead, it’s all about Montreal, its artists, its universities and its restaurants, a double slight because of the rivalry between the two cities.

The editor-in-chief of Paris Match admits the magazine got it wrong by leaving Quebec City out of the picture in the special edition, which hit newsstands in 120 countries yesterday.

Steve Faguy, a Montreal blogger and occasional copy editor at The Gazette, points to this quote from the magazine’s editor-in-chief:

“We didn’t know there was a competition between Quebec City and Montreal and to be honest, it doesn’t really matter to us and to our readers. But we now see that it is sensitive issue here.”

Agence France-Presse included some of the responses from French papers in a recent report:

“Paris Match honors Quebec… not really,” quipped the francophone daily Le Devoir after the French magazine published a special issue commemorating the anniversary but leaving Quebec City almost entirely out of the coverage, which focused in large part on its larger rival Montreal.

La Presse, another Montreal newspaper, declared it a “monumental gaffe,” while public broadcaster Radio-Canada suggested the “blunder” showed the French magazine was in the dark about the city and its eponymous province.

The English-language press also seized on the error, with the National Post saying Paris Match was obsessed with Montreal and its artists and restaurants — an affront to Quebec City whose rivalry with Montreal is “legendary.”

By way of apology, Paris Match editor-in-chief Gilles Martin-Chauffier said in Le Devoir: “We had no idea this was about the 400 years of Quebec (City), we thought it was about the founding of all of Quebec (province),” adding that the weekly will dedicate renewed coverage to the Quebec celebrations.

And here’s the predictable hockey reference from the story in The Gazette:

The rivalry between Quebec City and Montreal is legendary and it reached a climax when Quebec City still had a hockey team in the NHL. The Quebec Nordiques moved out of the city in 1995.

Paris-Match’s editor-in-chief has subsequently written a note for the publication’s website.

How lies survive

Craig Silverman — Mon, 12 May 2008 12:00:31 +0000

An article in Wednesday’s editions about the Indiana primary election quoted a man who said he thought Sen. Barack was a Muslim. The article inadvertently failed to note that Mr. Obama is in fact a Christian. Link

Apology

Craig Silverman — Mon, 12 May 2008 12:00:02 +0000

An article in the Timelines section on March 31 (In The Herald: 1988), referred to a court case in 1988 involving a contempt of court summons against the then senior workers’ compensation commissioner Brian Muirhead. The article should have reported that the matter was eventually settled in Mr Muirhead’s favour. The Herald apologises to Mr Muirhead for the omission. Link

Rest is fine

Craig Silverman — Mon, 19 Nov 2007 12:00:41 +0000

A few misfires found their way into the September/October issue. In Terry A. Dalton’s piece on Mike Pride, an editor added a phrase asserting that Pride started his thirty-year career at the Concord Monitor on the sports desk. In fact, he started at the Monitor as the managing editor, and had been a sports writer earlier in his career at The Tampa Tribune, among other papers. In that article, we also reported that Felice Belman had left the Monitor three times for jobs at bigger dailies, only to be lured back to Concord. One of those times she left to work on a gubernatorial campaign.
In Steve Wasserman’s bio at the end of the cover story, “Goodbye to All That,” we should have mentioned in the interest of full disclosure that among Wasserman’s clients at the literary agency Kneerim & Williams at Fish & Richardson is the Columbia Journalism Review.
In that same piece, we reported that the books editor of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution had been “shunted aside” in a reconfiguration of the newspaper’s arts coverage, and that book reviews had been “largely replaced” with wire copy. As explored in a piece by Julia M. Klein on page 40, the entire paper was being reconfigured, not just arts, and many jobs were altered. The books editor in fact resigned rather than reapply for the new books job, she says, because she did not like the direction books coverage was heading. The AJC’S current coverage includes more column inches on books and authors than in the past, though a substantial minority of book criticism is from wire services.
In his profile of Josh Marshall and Talking Points Memo, David Glenn wrote that TPM “was almost single-handedly responsible for bringing the story of the fired U.S. Attorneys to a boil.” This assertion ignores some important work done on the story by McClatchy Newspapers’ D.C. bureau.
And finally, we regret that we spelled Catherine Zeta-Jones’s name with a K, and called the Drug Enforcement Administration an Agency.

Tough luck, immigrants

Craig Silverman — Thu, 08 Nov 2007 12:00:17 +0000

Nov. 7–A headline on an A1 story in Tuesday’s Journal about Gov. Bill Richardson’s proposal for universal health care in New Mexico said, “Health Plan Excludes Immigrants.” It should have said the plan would exclude illegal immigrants.

Denial denied

Craig Silverman — Tue, 06 Nov 2007 12:00:21 +0000

On a Nov. 1 ESPN Radio SportsCenter Express report at 7:30 p.m. ET, a report saying Martina Hingis had tested positive for cocaine did not include her assertion that the test results were incorrect. This information was included in subsequent reports. Link