An Editor’s Note:
A story on page B1 of the April 5 edition of the Citizen, which looked at the future of NATO, should not have included quotes attributed to Clifford Gaddy, a Russia expert at the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C. Mr. Gaddy was not interviewed by the Citizen for that article, and the Brookings [...]
The website of German newspaper Der Spiegel recently issued a retraction for an article that claimed IKEA had a habit of naming inexpensive items after Danish towns. (High end items were named after Swedish, Finnish and Norwegian towns.) As the retraction explains, the story was based on a report in a Danish newspaper that turned [...]
This story has already blown up, but here is the official Times Editors’ Note:
The Books of The Times review in The Arts on Feb. 26 and an article in House & Home on Thursday described the experiences of Margaret B. Jones, who said that she had been a foster child and gang member in South [...]
February 29, 2008 – 12:07 pm
Roy Greenslade has the background on the above image:
This award-winning photograph, showing a herd of endangered Tibetan antelopes apparently undisturbed by a passing train on the controversial Qinghai-Tibet railway, has been exposed as a fake. The image was widely hailed in China as a symbol of harmonious co-existence between man and nature. But photographer Liu [...]
January 8, 2008 – 8:00 am
John McIntyre, the Baltimore Sun’s assistant managing editor for the copy desk, has written an excellent blog post about plagiarism and fabrication. McIntyre is the language and usage guru at the paper. He uses that knowledge base to offer up a list of ways to spot a plagiarist or fabulist. These should be provided to [...]
December 11, 2007 – 6:00 am
This is the least enjoyable part of running this site, but we suppose somebody’s got to do it. Herewith, a month-by-month report of instances of plagiarism and fabrication in the press. Of particular note is the high number of incidents of plagiarism at student newspapers this year. A disturbing trend, to be sure.
January
A columnist and [...]
December 4, 2007 – 8:00 am
From Roy Greenaslade of the Guardian:
Last Tuesday I carried a report headlined 11 relatives of Iraqi journalist killed. It now transpires that the story, widely carried in the United States, was false. Dhia al-Kawaz, editor of the Jordan-based Asawat al-Iraq news agency, has since admitted that his claim that gunmen had killed 11 of his [...]
December 3, 2007 – 9:28 pm
After four-and-a-half months of re-reporting, long bouts of silence, and tangling with the US Army and various publications and bloggers, The New Republic today published a lengthy article by editor Franklin Foer that attempts to offer the magazine’s final word on the veracity of columns written by Scott Thomas Beauchamp, its Baghdad Diarist.
We’ll skip to [...]
November 15, 2007 – 8:00 am
In a Nov. 13 story, The Associated Press incorrectly reported that Paris Hilton was praised by conservationists for highlighting the problem of binge-drinking elephants in northeastern India. Lori Berk, a publicist for Hilton, said she never made any comments about helping drunken elephants in India. Link
From the original article:
GAUHATI, India (AP) — With Rwanda off [...]
November 15, 2007 – 8:00 am
Bruce Schneier, one of the leading thinkers in IT security, recently wrote a column for Wired.com in which he uses the example of corrupt NBA referee Tim Donaghy to examine systems that suffer from single points of failure. The same concept directly relates to journalism and accuracy.
What sorts of systems — IT, financial, NBA [...]
October 31, 2007 – 4:00 am
Page Six yesterday noted the interesting Editor’s Note contained in the latest issue of Details. But subsequent reporting has called the Note into question. The Note basically implied that two quotes attributed to Ben Affleck in a profile were fabricated. Obviously, that’s quite serious.
But Josh Kolbin at the Observer writes in a blog post that [...]
October 26, 2007 – 6:00 am
Blair J. Parker, a sports reporter at the News Leader in Staunton, Virginia, was fired on Tuesday after an internal investigation revealed she “fabricated at least four stories and plagiarized from other stories on the Internet.”
Parker was suspended last week after a story she wrote was revealed to have been made up of parts plagiarized [...]
October 24, 2007 – 8:00 am
Background here and here.
TVNewser acquired the memo that ABC News head David Westin sent to staff about the findings of the internal investigation into the work of Alexis Debat, a former consultant with the network. Some relevant excerpts:
…This review was extremely sensitive, as it required going back to confidential sources in this country and abroad. [...]
January 25, 2007 – 8:00 am
WENN ran a story in it’s fourth feed on 19 January 2007 headlined “MATHEW KNOWLES FUMES AT HOLLYWOOD ‘RACISM’”. We are advised by Mr Knowles’ lawyers that comments attributed to Mr Knowles in the story were in fact not made by him and we’d like to take this opportunity to apologise unreservedly to Mr Knowles [...]
January 22, 2007 – 8:00 am
A correction from the paper’s sports reporter:
A deep apology is in order to Peetz girls head coach Kristen Hamil and her team as she was completely misquoted in Monday’s report of Peetz and Merino. In fact, I never spoke to the coach after the game nor over the phone about the game. To quote her [...]
August 14, 2006 – 8:01 am
We took a brief late summer vacation last week, but the corrections and accuracy news kept coming. So, enjoy some items of note from last week. And also read our other posts below for some notable corrections from last week.
Manipulated War Photos?
This big ongoing story relates to accusations against news organizations for running doctored war [...]
An item in Tuesday’s People column on Page 4A contained incorrect information obtained from WENN Celebrity News on IMDB.com that Oprah Winfrey would be taking part in a documentary series in which she would live in a tough Chicago neighborhood for a month. Winfrey will not appear in any such series, and WENN has retracted [...]
