Tag Archives: Fabrication

Telegraph-Journal apologizes for fabricated quote in wafergate story

September 16, 2009 – 8:00 am

telegraphjournalNew Brunswick’s Telegraph-Journal continues to atone for an erroneous report from earlier in the summer that set of a scandal in Canada. After apologizing to the prime minister, firing its editor, and suspending its publisher (he’s now back with the paper’s parent company), the paper on Saturday apologized to Monsignor Brian Henneberry for fabricating a quote from him in the offending report:

In its troubled report on the communion service at former governor general Roméo LeBlanc’s funeral mass in July, The Telegraph-Journal said prominently, on the front page, that Monsignor Brian Henneberry, a senior Saint John priest, had “demanded” that Prime Minister Stephen Harper explain what he had done with the communion wafer that he had been given. The newspaper has determined that Monsignor Henneberry said no such thing and believes that the false assertion was wholly the product of improper editorial manipulation.

The newspaper has concluded that the sensational manner in which it presented its interview with Monsignor Henneberry resulted in a serious distortion of his actual remarks which were otherwise competently reported. Monsignor Henneberry’s intent was simply to explain Roman Catholic belief and practice in a factual way after The Telegraph-Journal contacted him. It was not to accuse Prime Minister Harper of wrong-doing or to insinuate wrong-doing.

The Telegraph-Journal regrets this breach of journalistic principles and apologizes sincerely to Monsignor Henneberry for it.

The paper is under new editorial leadership and this latest apology could be a result of some form of internal investigation. Yet we still don’t know who decided to push the story into print, who came up with the allegation that the prime minister had pocketed the now-famous wafer, and who engaged in this “improper editorial manipulation.” (I think they mean fabrication, but I’ll just have to guess.)

So, again, who made this call? Former editor Shawna Richer lost her job over the incident, but did she come up with the false accusations and a fabricated quote? We still don’t know. As admirable as it is for the paper to continue to detail problems with the story, it has yet to explain what happened.

Amazing that it can print two apologies, punish two senior executives, and still keep such important details hidden. I’m not the only one to notice. Just read this bang-on comment on the apology (I added the hyperlinks for background):

The apology is welcome, even at this late date, but it magnifies the seriousness of the affront to journalism which was committed in the reporting of the former governor general’s funeral in July. It was really quite an apalling lapse, when all the particulars are added together. So much so that no concerned reader could be satisfied with anything less than a full account of who did what and why (if known). The euphemism “improper editorial manipulation” is simply frustrating, in part because it implies that there is such a thing as proper editorial “manipulation.”

Any hesitation to name names is understandable, but this did not stop the T-J from “outing,” by name, a student reporter who messed up on a few unimportant facts and another who submitted a translated column from a French-language newspaper as her own work. Needless to say, the “improper editorial manipulation” admitted to in today’s apology was a far more egregious offence. Yet we can only guess who was at fault.

Well said.

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

New Brunswick newspaper apologizes to Canadian Prime Minister over made up accusation; editor and publisher out

July 28, 2009 – 10:29 am

telegraphjournalToday the Telegraph-Journal in New Brunswick issued a remarkable front page apology for a report that became a national controversy in Canada.

In early July, the paper reported that Prime Minister Stephen Harper had pocketed the communion wafer given to him by a Roman Catholic priest at the funeral of former Governor-General Romeo LeBlanc. That report sparked an onslaught of other stories, eventually forcing the PM’s spokesman to issue a formal denial.

Today’s apology states that the allegation was inserted by an editor "without the knowledge of the reporters and without any credible support…" It does not state whether or not the editor in question deliberately fabricated the wafer incident or if he/she was passing on gossip. Either way, this is a huge embarrassment and a totally unacceptable course of events. It’s all the more notable because the paper in question was in the spotlight earlier this summer after it fired an intern for questionable reasons. Details on that are below. Here’s the apology:

On Wednesday, July 8, 2009, the Telegraph-Journal published a story about the funeral mass celebrating the life of former Governor-General Romeo LeBlanc that was inaccurate and should not have been published. We pride ourselves in maintaining high standards of journalism and ethical reporting, and regret this was not followed in this case.

The story stated that a senior Roman Catholic priest in New Brunswick had demanded that the Prime Minister’s Office explain what happened to the communion wafer which was handed to Prime Minister Harper during the celebration of communion at the funeral mass. The story also said that during the communion celebration, the Prime Minister "slipped the thin wafer that Catholics call ‘the host’ into his jacket pocket".

There was no credible support for these statements of fact at the time this article was published, nor is the Telegraph-Journal aware of any credible support for these statements now. Our reporters Rob Linke and Adam Huras, who wrote the story reporting on the funeral, did not include these statements in the version of the story that they wrote. In the editing process, these statements were added without the knowledge of the reporters and without any credible support for them.

The Telegraph-Journal sincerely apologizes to the Prime Minister for the harm that this inaccurate story has caused. We also apologize to reporters Rob Linke and Adam Huras and to our readers for our failure to meet our own standards of responsible journalism and accuracy in reporting.

So has the editor in question been fired? That’s an important query given not only the seriousness of this incident, but also because the paper’s actions earlier this summer require it to take a hard line with inaccuracy. I wrote a column about the paper’s firing of a summer intern named Matt McCann after he made factual errors in a story that may have made things uncomfortable for the paper’s owners, the wealthy Irving family.

The paper said McCann’s errors and the alleged lack of balance in his story were not up to its standards. So they fired him. (I don’t support their decision.) Now this. So will the editor in chief — who defended her decision to fire the student — step down for this major lapse on her watch? Ed: See update 3 below It would seem that’s a fair course of action considering the standard it set by firing McCann. As noted above, the apology also doesn’t detail whether the offending editor has been fired. Given the paper’s recent history, it should be more forthcoming about the consequences of this unprecedented incident.

UPDATE: Not long after publishing this post, I heard from a few sources that the editor and publisher’s names were not listed on the paper’s masthead in today’s edition. Dan McHardie noted this on Twitter, and I confirmed it with two other people. The paper hasn’t issued any formal statement so it’s too early to know if the absence of their names carries real significance. I’ll keep an eye on it.

UPDATE 2: I’d love to get your thoughts via email (editor at regrettheerror.com) or in the comments of this post: what’s the proper protocol for an editor when adding new information to a story? Should they always tell the reporter? Does it depend on the information? And for reporters: give me your best stories about having errors inserted into your work. (Don’t worry, I’m not looking to go after copy editors, but we all know this happens.) I’m hoping to use some thoughts and anecdotes for my Friday Columbia Journalism Review Column.

UPDATE 3: CBC reports that the editor and publisher are gone:

The publisher and editor of the New Brunswick Telegraph-Journal are no longer with the paper after it was forced to apologize to Stephen Harper and two of its own reporters over a story about whether the prime minister took communion at the state funeral of former governor general Roméo LeBlanc.

CBC News has confirmed that editor Shawna Richer has been fired and that Jamie Irving is no longer the publisher of the paper. Earlier, their names had been removed from the paper’s list of senior staff.

Some excerpts from my Columbia Journalism Review column:

Matt McCann wasn’t supposed to spend his summer working for St. Thomas University in Fredericton, New Brunswick.

For the second year in a row, McCann, a journalism student at St. Thomas, had landed a summer internship at the Telegraph-Journal. But that ended abruptly in May when he was fired a day after the paper published a story of his on the front page.

McCann’s article reported that roughly 100 faculty and staff from the University of New Brunswick had signed a letter protesting the school’s decision to award Premier Shawn Graham an honorary degree. After it was published, representatives from the university called the paper’s publisher and editor to talk about the article.

“We were really looking to elaborate our position,” UNB communications manager Dan Tanaka told the Toronto Star. “We felt we were given a minor mention at the bottom of the story.”

Apart from that gripe, the story contained three factual errors. McCann misspelled a person’s last name (“Stropel” instead of “Strople”) and title (“university secretary for UNB Fredericton” instead of “university secretary for UNB”). He also reported that the premier has an education degree from UNB—when, in fact, he has a physical education degree.

The errors were easily preventable and should not have appeared in the story. As far as them being a firing offense, however, I’ve never heard of anyone being let go for mistakes of this nature. Far more experienced journalists have repeatedly made worse mistakes and kept their jobs. Certainly that’s nothing to be proud of, but the Telegraph-Journal held McCann to a standard that other staffers can’t possibly meet…

Shawna Richer, the paper’s editor, has faced criticism for her decision to fire McCann. She insists the factual mistakes combined with the one-sided nature of the story to make it a deal breaker. Yet even the university spokesman told the Star that he was “surprised” to hear McCann was let go. In spite of their concerns, they didn’t ask for him to lose his job. (Read the story for yourself and decide if it’s so lacking in fairness and balance that the author deserves to be drummed out of a summer contract.)

The story of McCann’s firing eventually made its way to local radio in Saint John. During the report, a former editor of the paper in question suggested that the publisher, Jamie Irving, made McCann the scapegoat in order to maintain good relations with the governing party. That suggestion caused the Telegraph-Journal to respond with a story headlined, “CBC runs baseless story with no regard for facts or truth.”

From the story, which doesn’t match the aggressive tone of the headline:

“These kinds of errors of fact and judgment don’t constitute acceptable journalism at the Telegraph-Journal. We must cover stories with integrity, clarity and absolute accuracy,” Shawna Richer, the newspaper’s editor, said.

In a conversation that day with Richer, McCann acknowledged the errors but “did not seem to fully grasp the seriousness of them,” Richer said. “He was not a first-year intern. He worked here last summer. We expected more of him.”

Richer says the call was hers alone and no one pressured her. The paper has also acknowledged that McCann’s story was, obviously, reviewed by editors. After all, they deemed it good enough to warrant major front page placement. Those editors have all kept their jobs.

But if we accept Richer’s standard for fairness and accuracy, then I’m afraid to say that someone else at her paper needs to lose their job. If you read the online version of the article, you’ll notice that McCann’s three factual errors—which were deemed so bad that they were a major cause of his firing—are still in the article. The paper hasn’t corrected them. Those errors are still causing damage, and it was someone’s job to fix them in the online version, not to mention issue a correction.

So who else is going to lose their job? Or is it possible that the standard being enforced by the paper doesn’t apply to anyone but McCann?

 

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

UPDATED: Hawaii student journalist fired after fabricating sources and quotes in multiple articles

June 26, 2009 – 8:00 am

kaleoKris DeRego, the news editor at Ka Leo, the student paper at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, has been fired after the paper looked through his previous work and found a trail of fabricated sources and factual errors. From the paper’s report:

In a review of all stories written for Ka Leo between January 2008 and May 2009, the newspaper was unable to identify the existence of 29 people who were quoted by Ka Leo’s previous news editor as students at the University of Hawai’i at Mānoa.

Ka Leo’s professional staff was unable to find UH records for 21 of the people quoted in the newspaper. For eight other names, there were students with same or similar names, but they were not enrolled as students at the time they were quoted. In conversations with editors, the reporter said some of the errors resulted from poor handwriting, stress, and errors caused by the copy desk.

The reporter is no longer working at Ka Leo. Ka Leo will continue to strive to make sure that everything printed in the newspaper is a fact. All reporters will be asked to provide email addresses and phone numbers of sources quoted in Ka Leo to improve accuracy.

It then goes on to list the errors and fabrications. This report also details another part of DeRego’s past: 

If DeRego looks familiar it’s because he’s made headlines before. It was another newspaper story about him that tanked his 2006 candidacy for the Board of Education.

In the weeks before the election, the Star Bulletin reported accusations against DeRego of sexual abuse and theft. A former employer said he stole $8,000 mostly in liquor. Another newspaper that endorsed him for the BOE seat withdrew the endorsement and DeRego lost the electon.

Thanks to Anne and Romenesko.

UPDATE June 26: DeRego tells the Honolulu Advertiser that he didn’t fabricate quotes or sources:

Kris DeRego, in a written statement, said his stories were "adulterated during the copy (editing) process — a problem encountered by other staff members working at Ka Leo." …

"While I’ve certainly made mistakes as a reporter, I never intentionally misattributed quotes or attempted to mislead the paper’s readership," DeRego said. "To the contrary, I worked diligently on each of my stories, putting in extra time and effort to ensure that my work reflected the highest standards of professionalism and elevated the overall quality of the publication."

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

Guardian contributor admits telling tall tales about his time in the French Foreign Legion

April 24, 2009 – 8:00 am

guardianErwin James is the name used by a convicted murder murderer who writes regularly for the Guardian. (That name is somewhat different from the one he grew up with.) Back in 2006, he wrote an article about his time spent in the French Foreign Legion. Now, three years later, he has admitted to fabricating parts of that story. The Guardian published this correction:

A feature, published in 2006, in which the writer, Erwin James, recounted his experiences in the Foreign Legion contained information that was untrue. James was in the Foreign Legion for a time but his claim to have served with one of its regiments in Beirut in the summer of 1982 was false and a paragraph, which purported to describe his experiences there, was fiction. He did not join the Foreign Legion until the end of 1982, by which time his regiment had returned from Beirut. The article also suggested that James accompanied his regiment on missions to Djibouti and the Central African Republic. While these were regular regiment duties, James did not go there. He did, as he said in the piece, go to Chad. In a more recent article James said he joined the Foreign Legion in 1981. That was also untrue. In both articles, we should have made clear that names and/or nationalities of some individuals had been changed so that they could not be identified (Legion of honour, 13 January 2006, page 8, G2, and ‘God help anyone who weakened’: my life in the French Foreign Legion, 25 February 2009, page 2, G2). The readers’ editor will write about this in her weekly column on 27 April). Link

Erwin James, born Erwin James Monahan, also wrote a lenghty lengthy article to admit his fabrications and offer more details about his life before and after his prison sentence. An excerpt:

…I made a supremely stupid error of judgment. A report appeared in the news to the effect that the French Foreign Legion was reluctant to take men from Britain, as the British who had been volunteering were “too flabby”. I was asked to write a long piece about my experience in the legion and comment on the revelations in the news for G2, which I did. Irrationally now looking back and much to my mortification, I placed information in the piece which was blatantly untrue.

In order to camouflage my whereabouts in 1982 and create a fog around the facts of my crimes, I wrote the piece as if I was in the legion from the beginning of that year, when in fact I did not join up until the end of the year. In particular, I made reference to “we”, meaning my regiment, undertaking tours in various African countries in 1982. The regiment did indeed undertake those tours; only I was not with them. Neither could I have been in Beirut in September of that year, as I said I was in the piece. I knew all the details of that operation, as the 1st combat company had not long returned from Beirut when I joined them in Calvi in Corsica at the end of my basic training. On 25 February this year, in response to another news story relating to the legion, I wrote another vignette of legion life for G2. The anecdote – about a young German recruit getting bashed by an adjutant for picking the wrong time to say he wanted to leave the Legion – was true. But the date I said I had joined, 1981, was not.

I was prompted to come clean and alert the Guardian about this ridiculous deceit when my “true” identity was revealed on the web some weeks ago and the bloggers involved noted my prevarications about the length of time I had actually spent in legion. The deceit has left me embarrassed and sad for letting down not only the people at the Guardian who trusted me, but Guardian readers who have been so accepting of me and my prison-issue writing over the past 10 years. It is clear to me now that the only person I was really deceiving was myself. The fallout from my identification on that message board, and the lies I told, has led to this piece; to me feeling that I now have to be completely honest about both my time in the legion and to stop hiding from who I really am. I am aware that these revelations may prove painful for people to whom my past actions have caused immeasurable pain and distress. For that I am truly, truly sorry…

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

2008 Plagiarism/Fabrication Round-Up

December 16, 2008 – 8:00 am

As noted in this year’s edition of the Crunks, 2008 saw an example of institutional plagiarism (the Bulletin), as well as an incident of institutional fabrication (Mainichi Daily News). Both are mentioned below, along with the rest of this year’s notable examples of plagiarism and fabrication. On the more positive side of things, this year saw John McIntyre of the Baltimore Sun write a great guide to spotting a plagiarist or fabulist. It’s highly recommended. And now, on with the bad news. (Also, please email me if I missed any.)

January

The Weekly Standard apologized after it discovered that a December 2007 article by David Satter included several passages from articles published in the Eurasia Daily Monitor. Link

The Sunday Times (UK) “inadvertently” plagiarized content from Radar magazine. Link

The new sex columnist for the New York Press resigned after her first column included questions taken from Dan Savage’s syndicated sex column. Link

February

After work submitted by a contributor was found to have included plagiarized material, the Brown Daily Herald conducted a review and discovered “two [additional] articles … that contained passages similar or identical to those in other publications.” Link

An article in the Miami Herald contained passages taken from an article in the South Florida Sun-Sentinel. Link

The New York Times published an Editors’ Note that revealed a paragraph contained in a front page article about Argentina was taken from the Miami Herald. Slate’s Jack Shafer discovered the theft. Link

The Ventura County Star fired its surfing columnist after it discovered that two of his columns contained plagiarized material. Link

Award-winning photographer Liu Wei-qiang admitted to faking a widely-published photograph that showed a herd of endangered Tibetan antelopes near a passing train on the controversial Qinghai-Tibet railway. Link

Read More »

By Craig Silverman | Posted in Regret Articles | Also tagged , , | Comments

Mainichi Daily News apologizes, disciplines staff and relaunches website after repeatedly publishing “extremely inappropriate articles” that “were not checked”

July 21, 2008 – 12:34 pm

For many years, the Mainichi Daily News, the English website of Japanese newspaper Mainichi Shimbun, was the place to go if you wanted to read salacious articles about the sexual habits of the Japanese. The stories, which were featured in the site’s “WaiWai” column, frequently stretched believability. Here’s a list of stories published on its site, as collected by the blog, The Truth From Japan (some links/headlines are from external sites that picked up on the Mainichi stories):

After what appears to be a thorough internal investigation, the paper yesterday issued an apology and announced that the website would “start over again.” (Credit to Fark for spotting the apology.)

This means the company has taken “punitive measures” against managers and staff responsible for the content and will, in effect, relaunch the website with a new focus and commitment to accuracy. From the paper’s apology:

…We continued to post articles that contained incorrect information about Japan and indecent sexual content. These articles, many of which were not checked, should not have been dispatched to Japan or the world. We apologize deeply for causing many people trouble and for betraying the public’s trust in the Mainichi Shimbun.

The Mainichi Newspapers took punitive measures on July 20 against Managing Director Yoshiyuki Watanabe, who previously served as general manager of the Multimedia Division, and another senior official, to hold them responsible as supervisors, in addition to those who were earlier punished.

We will take the following measures to prevent a recurrence of the problems pointed out to us through the criticism and opinions received from many readers, through our in-house investigation, and as indicated by the Open Newspaper Committee of experts:

On Aug. 1, we will reorganize the MDN Editorial Department, and on Sept. 1, under a new chief editor, the MDN will be transformed into a more news-oriented site. We will translate Mainichi Shimbun editorials and commentaries by prominent figures, such as “Jidai-no-Kaze” (Sign of the Times), and post them on the site in an effort to deepen the understanding of Japan among readers overseas.

At the same time, we will set up an advisory group to the MDN comprised of Megumi Nishikawa, an expert senior writer, and other staff writers specializing in international news coverage. The group will check the MDN’s editorial plans and the content of articles in the MDN.

We are determined to try our utmost to regain the public trust that we have lost as a result of this incident and rehabilitate the English site into one that can dispatch information about Japan to the world in an appropriate manner.

A second apology, also published yesterday and viewable below the first, offers additional details about how the paper will change the way it produces and checks articles. One priority is to “appoint a female employee as the new chief editor, based on our realization that the lack of a woman’s point of view, in addition to the lack of a checking system, helped to create a situation in which inappropriate articles continued to be published in the column.”

At the bottom of the page containing the apologies is a series of links to material from the paper’s investigation. It rivals the New York Times’ report on Jayson Blair as one of the most detailed and revelatory internal investigations of journalistic malfeasance. For example, you can read the findings of its internal investigative team, which lists “Defects in the checking system,” the “Absence of an editorial quality control system,” and “Deficiency in journalistic morals” as a few of the factors that contributed to the site’s failures.

There’s also a “Chronology of problems” and links to comments from the members of the paper’s Open Newspaper Committee (1, 2, 3, 4).

This could very well be the first time that a modern news organization has decided to “start over” due to irresponsible reporting.

Some additional reading:

By Craig Silverman | Posted in Behind the scenes, Major Errors, Newspapers, Online | Also tagged , , , , | Comments

Ottawa Citizen publishes highly questionable quotes

April 30, 2008 – 8:00 am

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 Institution says that the quotes incorrectly attributed to him do not reflect his actual views.

So were the quotes fabricated? Plagiarized from another source? How did this happen? And why can’t/won’t the paper explain the origin of the quotes to readers?

Here are the relevant passages from the article, which is not online:

“What confuses matters is that the two pillars of Bush’s legacy plan — developing a better relationship with Russia and promoting democracy through NATO in Eastern Europe — appear to be in conflict with each other,” says Clifford Gaddy, a Russia expert at the Brookings Institute, another Washington think-tank. “The result is he might wind up achieving neither.”

Ukraine and Georgia provide another contradiction, Mr. Gaddy notes. Support for NATO membership might be high among ex-patriates in Canada and the U.S., but polls suggest the people actually living in the two countries are not so sure.

“In Ukraine, there is still lingering suspicion of NATO left over from the Cold War,” he says, “and while there might not be a lot of love for the Russians, people see the advantages of not provoking them. It’s a pretty even split.”

Note that the Brookings Institution is incorrectly identified as the “Brookings Institute” in the article. That error is not corrected in the Editor’s Note.

From further down in the story:

For his part, Mr. Gaddy of the Brookings Institute contends that NATO, one tier or not, is as valuable as ever to the U.S. in a world where the rise of China as a great power, combined with the muscle of a resurgent Russia across Eurasia, requires the counterweight of an North American-European alliance

Thanks, Doug!

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

Der Spiegel retracts article about IKEA’s anti-Danish nomenclature

March 12, 2008 – 8:00 am

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 out to be wildly exaggerated, if not completely fabricated. The story ran in other media outlets, notably the Daily Telegraph. Its story is still online sans correction or retraction. The Guardian has a comment piece about the debacle, and Adrian Monck also tackled the topic.
The retraction:

Last week, SPIEGEL ONLINE published an article about IKEA products named after Danish cities. We regret that we must retract the article because of inaccurate reporting. We apologize for the error.
In the article originally published at this address, SPIEGEL falsely reported that Danish researchers Klaus Kjøller and Trøls Mylenberg had conducted a “thorough analysis” of the naming conventions at Swedish furniture maker IKEA. In fact, Kjøller was approached by a journalist from the free daily Nyhedsavisen who had inquired about why apparently inferior IKEA products had been given the names of Danish towns.
Kjøller answered the question, but says he was very surprised by the “extremely exaggerated” article that appeared on the cover of Nyhedsavisen the following day, which would later get picked up by other media in Denmark and abroad, including SPIEGEL ONLINE.
“The story sounds good, but it unfortunately isn’t true,” Kjøller told SPIEGEL ONLINE on Monday. The author of the article and the editorial staff failed to contact Kjøller prior to the publication of the article.
SPIEGEL ONLINE strives to adhere to the highest standards of reporting and apologizes to its readers for the error, which we deeply regret.
– The Editors

Thanks, Ole!

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

Editors’ note

March 6, 2008 – 8:00 am

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 Central Los Angeles and survived to write a book about that life. “Margaret B. Jones” turned out to be a pseudonym, and her story a complete fabrication, as The Times reported on Tuesday. An article about how her publisher, and the newspaper, failed to discover the truth earlier appears today. Link

By Craig Silverman | Posted in Books, Fabrication | Also tagged | Comments

Photographer admits faking widely published image

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 Wei-qiang admitted it was a fabrication after commenters on a Chinese online photography forum questioned its authenticity.
“The train was real, and so were the antelopes,” said Liu in a posting on the forum. “But the magic moment just didn’t happen even after I had waited for two weeks.” Therefore, he decided to merge together one picture of a passing train with another of the migrating animals “to raise the public awareness of antelope protection”.
The merged picture was published by more than 200 media outlets around the world and won Liu a bronze medal in the 2006 Most Influential News Photos of the Year competition, sponsored by CCTV, China’s state television. Liu has now been dismissed from the Daqing Evening News in Heilongjiang province.

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

How to spot a plagiarist/fabulist

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 every editor in every newsroom:

Changes in diction: If the vocabulary of an otherwise amateurish student writer or cliche-ridden hack journalist should abruptly grow sophisticated, lifting is likelier than an infusion from the muse.

Changes in syntax: Same thing. If a writer who struggles to cobble together a noun and a verb suddenly masters the compound-complex sentence, with attendant Ciceronian participial ornaments, it’s time to start looking elsewhere.

Specialized information: Ask Howard Baker’s question from the Watergate hearings of beloved memory: What did he know, and when did he know it? Sudden access to biographical details, historical information, ecclesiastical terminology or scientific or medical expertise has to have come from somewhere. Demand an explanation of the source.

Dubious sources: Any article based on a single source is automatically suspect — how can you tell that the source wasn’t lying? Where’s the confirmation? Similarly, anything based on second- or third-hand sources demands scrutiny. In addition, readers are justifiably suspicious of anonymous sources. Even when anonymity has been granted for good reason, such as the source’s reasonable fear of physical or economic injury, the writer should be obliged to reveal the source to the assigning editor, acquire supporting information, and give the reader as much information as is prudent about the anonymous source’s credibility.

Improbabilities: When Jack Kelly filed his famous story with USA Today about seeing, in the aftermath of a bombing, human heads rolling down the street, their eyelids still blinking, it would have been a good thing for the paper if an editor had said, “What the hell?” and followed up. In journalism, as in investment offers, if it looks too good to be true. …

Here’s more great advice about how to follow up if you suspect plagiarism or fabrication, and what to do if your discover it:

Your job is to be skeptical, not gullible. Any writer’s work ought to stand up to questioning, particularly about sourcing. So ask the questions.

As it happens, the very ease of theft that the Internet provides also offers ease of detection. Use Lexis-Nexis or Google to find information on the subject that the suspect article covers. Do searches on distinctive and anomalous phrases. (Some colleges and universities employ specialized software and run term papers through it.) Check it out.

Follow up. The first question that must always be asked when a plagiarism is detected is this: Has he/she done this before? This has to be checked out, but it won’t be unless you, who have detected the misdeed, report it to someone in authority.

Don’t agonize over fear of appearing to be an informer. If the instance you identify is a first-time mistake made out of ignorance, you may save a colleague’s career. If it turns out to be one in a pattern of lies, then the career wasn’t worth saving.

Seriously, this should be handed out to every editor in every newsroom.

By Craig Silverman | Posted in Behind the scenes, Fabrication, Plagiarism | Also tagged | Comments

2007 Plagiarism/Fabrication Round-Up

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 the administrative assistant to the editor at the San Antonio Express-News resigned after she was found plagiarizing from Wikipedia and other sources in three columns. Link

February
MSNBC.com removed a story how to sell a home in the slow winter season after it was discovered parts of it were plagiarized from an article on About.com. MSNBC did not the name the offender. Link

The Michigan Daily, a student newspaper, fired a writer after discovering plagiarism in four articles. The paper did not name the writer. Correction: The paper did name the writer.Link

March
The New York Times published an editor’s note after readers pointed out “a number of resemblances” between an essay in the Book Review and a passage in the book, “Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader.” It was not definitively determined to be plagiarism. Link

The Boston Globe suspended a sports columnist for two months without pay after it was revealed he plagiarized from a story in the News Tribune of Tacoma, Wash. Link

The chief editorial writer of Yamanashi Nichinichi Shimbun, a Japanese newspaper, was fired after admitting he had plagiarized in at least 15 editorials. Link

The New York Times published a letter to the editor about Dick Cheney that was later revealed to have been almost entirely “copied from an article about Mr. Cheney and the trial from the previous day’s newspaper.” Link

April
CBS News fired a producer after she plagiarized from the Wall Street Journal for a video essay on “Couric & Co.,” the Katie Couric/group blog on the CBS News website. Though CBS did not name her, the NY Sun later did. Link, link

The Daily Pennsylvanian, a student newspaper, fired a columnist after one of her submissions “bore uncanny similarities to a Yahoo! Food piece from March.” Link

The Washington Post published this correction: “One of the poems that KidsPost published as part of its poetry contest on Tuesday was not written by the child who submitted it. The poem that appeared as “Who Am I?” was actually written by J. Patrick Lewis and published in his book “Monumental Verses.” The child who sent the poem to KidsPost said she didn’t realize that entries to the contest had to be original. But copying something that someone else wrote without giving them credit is plagiarism, and it’s wrong.” Link

May
The Times UK ran a correction after “Some portions of an article about Hollywood romantic comedies” were not “attributed to… a New York Daily News article on the same subject from January.” Joe Neumaier, the author of the News article wrote the Times to say he considered it to be a case of plagiarism. Link

Chilean magazine Cosas withdrew an issue from newsstands after Radar magazine accused it of plagiarism. The Radar article “Toxic Bachelors” was translated and reproduced in Cosas by the magazine’s New York correspondent. Link

June
None.

July
Japanese newspaper Shizuoka Shimbun apologized after a front-page story about the death of a former prime minister was revealed to have been plagiarized from Wikipedia. Link

August
A reporter for the Explorer, weekly paper in Arizona, was fired after they were found to have taken a story written for a journalism class and, with a few minor updates, passed it off as new work. Aside from the dishonesty, one of the problems was that the piece was outdated and therefore contained inaccurate information. The paper did not name the reporter. Link

The Guardian published a correction and offered an apology after “A short introduction to an article about Russian oligarchs included three paragraphs that were substantially similar to paragraphs contained in the introduction to another, earlier, article, published in May, in the Exile – an English-language newspaper based in Moscow.” Link

September
None.

October
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.” Link

A sex columnist at the GW Hatchet, a student newspaper, was fired after a column he wrote “borrowed ideas” from a book and website. Link

November
A columnist at the Brown Daily Herald, a student newspaper, was fired after editors discovered that six of his columns included plagiarized material. The same writer also plagiarized in a letter to the editor that was published in the New York Times. Link

A professor at the Missouri School of Journalism lost his column in a university paper staffed by journalism students and faculty after admitting he committed “unintentional” plagiarism. Link

The San Antonio Express-News fired a longtime sports reporter after he plagiarized from www.bowl.com and www.pbatour.com. Many people took to the comments section of our post to protest his firing and question whether he had in fact plagiarized. Link

The Economist published a correction after a freelance writer in Uganda plagiarized from the Daily Monitor in Uganda and used the work in a piece for the magazine. Link

December
After four-and-a-half months of re-reporting, The New Republic retracted articles written by its Baghdad Diarist. Link

The National Review Online had to retract a story and clarify another after questions were raised about the veracity of the reporting, though the publication denied any fabrication occurred. Link

Dhia al-Kawaz, the editor of the Jordan-based Asawat al-Iraq news agency, admitted he fabricated the story that 11 members of his family had been killed in Iraq. In reality, one member was killed. Link

Did we miss any? Let us know.

By Craig Silverman | Posted in Plagiarism, Regret Articles | Also tagged , | Comments

Editor retracts story of killings

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 family members in Baghdad was untrue. In fact, only his brother-in-law was killed in a single incident. His family say he lied in order to get his family refugee status in Jordan.

More here.

By Craig Silverman | Posted in Fabrication, Wire service | Also tagged , | Comments

TNR retracts Baghdad Diarist stories

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 the punchline, which is contained at the very end of a very long article:

In retrospect, we never should have put Beauchamp in this situation. He was a young soldier in a war zone, an untried writer without journalistic training. We published his accounts of sensitive events while granting him the shield of anonymity–which, in the wrong hands, can become license to exaggerate, if not fabricate.

When I last spoke with Beauchamp in early November, he continued to stand by his stories. Unfortunately, the standards of this magazine require more than that. And, in light of the evidence available to us, after months of intensive re-reporting, we cannot be confident that the events in his pieces occurred in exactly the manner that he described them. Without that essential confidence, we cannot stand by these stories.

We’ve read many retractions and editor’s notes over the last few years, and this is among the longest and most detailed. On its face, that’s a plus. Serious incidents are too often explained away with just a few sentences, and many details are left out. TNR has offered up a retelling of how concerns were raised about Beauchamp’s writing, and how the magazine responded to those concerns. But that doesn’t make it a completely satisfying account and explanation.

It takes Foer several thousand words to arrive at the above paragraphs; he’s buried the lede.

The lede also itself lacks a suitably blunt admission of retraction, an expression of regret, and an explanation of how the magazine will alter its policies and procedures to prevent this from happening again. Also, nowhere in the lengthy piece does Foer apologize to readers; in fact, he makes a point of opening with what seems like a dig at the Weekly Standard reporter who first raised concerns: “I didn’t know him or his byline.”

Foer takes other media to task for jumping to conclusions and explains how the military made it difficult for TNR to complete its re-reporting. Okay, interesting background. The outside pressures certainly made it difficult, but they’re not the focus at this point. The articles have been retracted — that’s the bottom line. TNR has to take its lumps and not appear as if it’s trying to spread blame.

As Maggie Shnayerson of Gawker noted earlier today:

Foer ought to have taken a page from the Chuck Lane School of Apologia. In 1998, when addressing TNR readers in the wake of the Stephen Glass scandal, the magazine’s 500-word piece concluded simply: “We offer no excuses for any of this. Only our deepest apologies to all concerned.”

Foer’s piece isn’t exactly a glossing over of the issue, but it hits several wrong notes and almost feels as if the final truth of retraction has been buried underneath an avalanche of expository writing. A simple, frank admission and expression of regret at the top of the piece would have made the important facts clear. Then the interesting background would be just that: background

By Craig Silverman | Posted in Behind the scenes, Fabrication, Magazines, Major Errors, Regret Articles | Also tagged , , | Comments

Paris Hilton and the drunken elephants

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 her charity calendar, Paris Hilton has turned her attention to the plight of … drunken elephants in India.
“The elephants get drunk all the time. It is becoming really dangerous. We need to stop making alcohol available to them,” the 26-year-old socialite was quoted as saying by the World Entertainment News Network’s Web site.
In the wake of her jail term for an alcohol-related reckless driving case, Hilton is seeking to remake her image from club-hopping party girl to world-traveling do-gooder. She announced plans to do charity work in Rwanda, but the trip was postponed until next year.
Then opportunity for Hilton’s “global elephant campaign” knocked last month when six parched pachyderms broke into a farm in the state of Meghalaya and guzzled farmers’ homemade rice beer. The elephants went on a rampage, then uprooted an electricity pole and were jolted to death…

WENN is not exactly a reliable outlet when it comes to celebrity scoops. We’ve published  two previous posts about salacious WENN stories that were later retracted. See here and here.  AP and other media outlets should not be publishing “scoops” from WENN without doing some independent verification.

By Craig Silverman | Posted in Fabrication, Wire service | Also tagged , , | Comments

What IT security can teach us about accuracy

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 games or whatever — are most at risk of being manipulated? The ones where the smallest change can have the greatest impact, and the ones where trusted insiders can make that change.

Donaghy used his position to try and influence the outcome of games, and he was able to because of the way the NBA games operate:

Because individual players matter so much, a single referee can affect a basketball game more than he can in any other sport. Referees call fouls. Contact occurs on nearly every play, any of which could be called as a foul. They’re called “touch fouls,” and they are mostly, but not always, ignored. The refs get to decide which ones to call.

Schneier lists other examples of jobs where people are “both trusted insiders and single points of catastrophic failure.” It could be a “dishonest computer-repair technician…a corrupt judge, police officer, customs inspector, border-control officer, food-safety inspector…”

Or a journalist. Newsrooms build in layers of auditing in an attempt to mitigate the ability of a trusted insider to subvert the system: copy editors, assignment editors etc. But each person in the chain of audit (editing process) is both a point of quality control and a potential point of failure. We then attempt to mitigate that reality by requiring reporters to take notes or record interviews, cite sources, and talk to experts.

Yet we still see people like Jayson Blair and Stephen Glass, trusted insiders who become single points of catastrophic failure. Incidents of plagiarism, fabrication, and extreme error abound. Clearly, we need to evolve our audit systems. The current reality of shrunken newsrooms — and therefore reduced audit controls — makes it even more imperative that we innovate new ways of ensuring quality. The speed of online news also requires us to find ways to do it at a faster pace.

Yes, a tough challenge. But an exciting one, too.

“All systems have trusted insiders,” according to Schneier. “All systems have catastrophic points of failure. The key is recognizing them, and building monitoring and audit systems to secure them.”

So what does the ideal newsroom monitoring and auditing system look like? Likely a combination of prevention — fact checking, plagiarism detection, training, editing etc. — mixed with post-publication/post-broadcast error tracking and analysis. These elements demand a mix of people, processes and technology. The challenge is creating the right mix and then constantly managing, evolving and improving the system.

It’s a difficult task, but the status quo is a recipe for repeated “catastrophic failures.”

Would you keep following the NBA if you knew another Tim Donaghy was inevitable?

Have an idea for newsroom auditing? Share it in the comments.

By Craig Silverman | Posted in Regret Articles | Also tagged , , , | Comments

Details offers an (incorrect?) Editor’s Note

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 he was told by a Details publicist that “the quote in the story—written by freelancer Bart Blasengame—was actually accurate.”
“The comments were taken out of context,” said the spokeswoman. “There was absolutely nothing that was fabricated.”
As the Observer notes, “In that case, it would be [Details editor Dan] Peres who was inaccurate.” Gawker was told the same thing, in addition to receiving the information that Details’ editor-in-chief and Affleck are good friends.
“Were things taken out of context—or were they invented, as Peres says?” asks Gawker. “Because there’s a really serious line there to be considered before destroying someone’s career in journalism to appease a snippy star.”
Indeed. Building on that blog post, the latest edition of the Observer in print includes a comment from Details* editor Dan Peres. “I stand by the correction that I published, and I stand by the statements made on behalf of me and Details.”
Ah, so “nothing was… fabricated,” and yet Affleck never “made such a statement.”
The Observer tracked down Affleck’s publicist, who sides with the Editor’s Note:

Shawn Sachs, a publicist for Ben Affleck, was more definitive. “Ben didn’t say that [quote],” Mr. Sachs told The Observer. “It’s completely made up. In having to pick a side, I pick Dan Peres and the magazine over what their spokesperson is trying to spin.”
When informed of Mr. Peres’ statement, Mr Sachs e-mailed: “The magazine apology said ‘Never made such a statement.’ … The Details publicist said ‘Taken out of context.’ … They sure don’t sound like the same thing.”

On another note: Portfolio previously reported that Blasengame’s byline was mistakenly left off the story. He must be in love with Details right now.
And we’re still left wondering exactly what was and wasn’t said by Affleck, and what should and shouldn’t be corrected by Details. Is it really so hard for the magazine to give a clear explanation?

*Correction November 5, 2007: The title of the magazine was initially misspelled as “Detials” in this sentence.

By Craig Silverman | Posted in Magazines | Also tagged , , | Comments

Plagiarism and fabrication at the News Leader

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 from at least five different sources. One top of that, “Only one source was clearly real and correctly identified, and he disputes the quote attributed to him.”
This could be a record for the number of plagiarized sources contained in one article. A column from the paper’s executive editor describes how that then led to a larger investigation:

Following that first revelation, we began to dig deeper into Parker’s work. On Friday, Oct. 19, we realized that a community profile she had written — and which had been prepared for Friday publication before Thursday’s revelations — also was suspect. The story profiled Andrew Koch and identified him as a University of Virginia student and a Cavaliers fan. A photo was included. At 8:52 a.m. someone who identified himself as Andrew Koch came onto our newspaper forums and said that while his name and photo were used on the profile, he was not a University of Virginia student, a Cavalier’s fan and he had not vacationed in Cancun. He said that despite the use of his name and image, he was not the subject of the article. He said the photo was identical to one on a website at James Madison University, where he works. We could not locate a student Andrew Koch at U.Va. and on Saturday (Oct. 20) ran a correction stating that the profile was false.

The editor then details four more incidents of plagiarism and/or fabrication. Parker has owned up to her transgressions. “When asked about the problems in the deer-hunting story on Thursday, Parker told Publisher Roger Watson and me that she took full responsibility for her actions,” writes David Frtiz. “On Tuesday, she admitted the other fabrications and offered no explanation.”
He concludes with an apology:

So I apologize to you for the actions of our reporter. Our goal from the first sign of wrongdoing was to quickly and transparently understand the scope of the problem and to take firm action. It’s our responsibility to our readers. I also apologize that we didn’t figure it out sooner.

Here are two corrections published by the paper before it fired Parker:

The reporting for a local profile on Page A4 Friday cannot be verified. The photo that ran with it is of an Andrew Koch, but that Andrew Koch was not interviewed for the piece. Because of this, we retract the entire profile. The work of Blair J. Parker, the reporter who prepared the profile, is under review by The News Leader. That section of A4 was prepared early on Thursday, before questions were raised about her other work. More information will be released once the investigation is complete. Link

A Thursday B1 story about the fall deer and trout seasons by Blair J. Parker was plagiarized from several sources. We have confirmed that large portions of the story came from other sources and that facts within the story were incorrect, thus we retract the article in its entirety.
We are beginning a thorough investigation of Parker’s work since she joined the newspaper in 2006. Plagiarism and knowingly publishing inaccurate information violates The News Leader’s Principles of Ethical Conduct, a commitment to you that we take very seriously. We will report our findings once the investigation is complete
— David Fritz, executive editor Link

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

ABC News investigation clears Alexis* Debat of fabrication, cites “four details… that we couldn’t confirm”

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. It also involved traveling to Pakistan to confirm first-hand the circumstances of Mr. Debat’s work there. Early in our review, we learned that there were other interviews Mr. Debat had published in France that the subjects denied had been conducted. We reported this story immediately on ABC News.com. We have now completed our review. After going through all of the stories Mr. Debat worked on for ABC News, we found no instances of false reporting. Mr. Debat was not the sole source for anything ABC News reported. Moreover, we confirmed with Mr. Debat’s confidential sources that they had given him the information as he’d claimed in contributing to our reports. We also confirmed that Mr. Debat traveled to the locations in Pakistan as he had claimed and talked with the sources he had identified.
Our review did uncover four details of Mr. Debat’s reporting that we couldn’t confirm. In one case, he mis-identified which branch of U.S. Special forces had engaged in a particular operation, although we did confirm the other facts surrounding the operation. We also found disagreements over the location for two meetings reported on by Mr. Debat, although, again, we could confirm the other facts surrounding the meetings. And, one of the people whom Mr. Debat identified as attending a meeting would neither confirm nor deny that he/she was a direct participant. None of these discrepancies would rise to the level of a formal, on-air retraction because none of them was material to the substance of our report.

So none of the stories he worked on need to be retracted, but does this mean ABC News won’t inform viewers of its findings? Why not explain the detailed investigation that took place?

Also, an AP story about the memo that ABC has on its website seems to have a misleading headline. (This appears to be AP’s doing, not ABC’s; see here.) It reads, “ABC: No Errors Tied to ‘Fake’ Consultant.” But Westin’s memo clearly states that there are details and facts that can’t be confirmed. Is that really the same as “no errors”? Also, the AP story does not detail the discrepancies outlined in the memo. Why not?

ABC News is also instituting changes to its practices:

There are three changes we are making in our internal practices based on what we’ve learned from this case.
Starting immediately, we will include both our News Practices team and the corporate Human Resources Department in the hiring of all consultants, reviewing in particular claims of prior employment and educational history. We will also undertake a review of current consultants where appropriate.
When we hire a consultant, we will make a determination of exactly how that person will be identified on all programs and platforms.
News Practices will be alerted each time that we include a consultant in our reporting to ensure that the consultant is being used and identified properly.
We undertake extensive efforts in all of our reporting — and particularly in our investigative reporting — to check and double-check information we are given so that no one source can compromise the truth of what we present to our audiences. Based on our review, our overall systems and procedures worked in the case of Mr. Debat. Nothing in our review, of course, condones the instances of resume enhancement or fake interviews that Mr. Debat published elsewhere.

*Correction November 4, 2007: The headline of this post originally misspelled “Alexis” as “Aexis.” It was corrected after a reader brought the error to light.

By Craig Silverman | Posted in Major Errors, Regret Articles, Television | Also tagged , , , | Comments Off

Retraction

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 for the unintentional misunderstanding caused by the story which is hereby retracted.

We can’t locate the original.

By Craig Silverman | Posted in Fabrication, Wire service | Also tagged , | Comments Off

Fabricated quote

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 on false information is simply poor reporting on my part and I sincerely apologize to coach Hamil, the Lady Bulldogs, and the Peetz athletic department. Link

It’s dishonest to call it a misquote. By his own admission, he didn’t speak with the coach. That means it’s fabrication.

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

The week that was

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 photos from the middle east. All this started when Reuters contributing photographer Adnan Hajj was found to have altered photos taken of the war in Lebanon. Reuters subsequently dismissed him and removed his photos from its databases. Accusations against other photographers have now started to fly. A round-up here and more here.

Wired News Removes Three Stories After Discovering Freelancer Fabricated Sources
The online news source has, for the second time in a little more than a year, had to investigate the work of a freelance contributor. Last year’s investigation resulted in Wired placing editor’s notes in 24 of freelancer Michelle Delio’s articles. Then on August 9 it announced a similar investigation had turned up problems with another writer:

Wired News has removed three articles from its website after an internal investigation failed to confirm the authenticity of a source
used in the stories. “Tribal Curse Haunts Launch Pad” (June 27, 2006), “NASA Boosts Heart-Monitoring Tech” (July 7, 2006) and “Don’t Flush It — Breathe It” (July 14, 2006), all by Philip Chien, relied in part on quotes and citations from Robert Ash, described in the first two stories as a “space historian” and in the last as an “aeronautical engineer and amateur space historian.”
In a phone conversation with Wired News editors, Chien had identified Ash as a professor of aeronautical engineering at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia. Reached by phone this week, Ash said he is not a space historian and has never participated in interviews with Chien. Ash is an aeronautical engineering professor at the university and has been involved in numerous NASA projects.
Chien is a freelance space reporter who has worked for online, print and television news outlets, and recently authored a book on the Columbia space shuttle disaster. He’s written seven stories for Wired News, two of them in 2004, the other five in the past few weeks…

The article explains more about how Wired discovered problems with Chien’s work. But of interest here is that Wired News instituted a new policy requiring all writers to submit contact information for each source in a story. It appears that the publication then conducts random checks with these sources, or follows up when they suspect something isn’t kosher.

Chicago Tribune Condemns The Wrong Eddie Johnson
The paper that last year managed to misidentify two Chicago men as mobsters two days in a row made another egregious mistaken ID last week. A former NBA player named Eddie Johnson was charged with sexual assault. But there are two Eddie Johnsons who played in the NBA, and the Tribune, rushing to get the news item in the paper before deadline, chose the wrong one. The mistaken Johnson told AP that it was the worst day of his life. “Devastating. Hard to explain,” he told the news service.
The day after its error, the Tribune ran an editor’s note and a correction. The editor’s note/apology:


Haste to make deadline is no excuse for putting incorrect information in a newspaper. Factual errors erode a paper’s credibility.

We made an inadvertent but hurtful error Tuesday night in an effort to get as much news as possible into Wednesday’s final edition of the Tribune sports section, and we would like to apologize to Eddie Johnson, his family and friends, and our readers.
An Associated Press story detailing the arrest of “former NBA All-Star Eddie Johnson” moved across the wire late Tuesday, and a decision was made to get it into the “Press Box” segment of the sports section, where our sports briefs go.
In Chicago, former NBA star Eddie Johnson means Eddie Johnson, 47, a 6-foot-7-inch forward from Westinghouse High School and the University of Illinois, the Eddie Johnson who went on to a 17-year pro career with seven NBA teams. The Eddie Johnson who was distinguished as much by good citizenship and charity work as by 19,202 career points, a 16-point scoring average and the NBA’s Sixth Man of the Year Award he won with the Phoenix Suns in 1988-89.

Unfortunately, the man arrested Tuesday was “the other” Eddie Johnson, 51, a 6-2 guard from Auburn who had a 10-year career with three NBA teams and has been in and out of trouble with the law since he quit playing in 1987.
In the last paragraph of the wire story, “the other” Eddie Johnson was identified correctly as a former Atlanta Hawks
All-Star who played college ball at Auburn. But in our haste to make deadline, we failed to make the distinction.
The Ocala, Fla., dateline should have been one tipoff. Chicago’s Eddie Johnson lives in Phoenix and works as a television analyst for the Suns. The charges–sexual battery on a child younger than 12 and residential burglary–should have been not a tipoff but a red flag. Anyone who knows or has had even limited contact with Chicago’s Eddie Johnson would find it unfathomable that he would be linked to such behavior.

“It has happened before” in other media, Johnson said Wednesday from his home in Phoenix. “The other guy keeps getting in trouble, and since I’m the more visible of the two, it keeps coming back to me.”

For the record, Chicago’s Eddie Johnson remains extensively involved in charity work, including motivational speaking and basketball clinics for kids. In addition to his broadcasting duties, he is president of a Phoenix telecommunications firm. He got his degree from Illinois in 1981, and he was and is regarded as one of the NBA’s model citizens.
Again, we apologize.
“It has been a tough day,” Johnson said, “but I appreciate you trying to set the record straight.”

And it looks like the South Florida Sun-Sentinel made the same error:

An item in the Briefing on Page 2C of Thursday’s Sports section did not make clear the identity of a former NBA player who has been charged with sexual assault, according to police in Ocala. The former NBA player charged, Eddie Johnson, played in the NBA from 1977-87 with the Atlanta Hawks, Cleveland Cavaliers and Seattle SuperSonics. He is not to be confused with the Eddie Johnson who is now a television analyst with one of his former teams, the Phoenix Suns. Link

An amusing correction from the New York Post’s Page Six:

August 10, 2006 – LARRY David and his wife, Laurie, must have pretty convincing doubles. The testy comic says yesterday’s
report from our spy that David went ballistic when his BMW was hit by a shopping cart on Martha’s Vineyard is “so fantastical, I’m considering hiring your source for my show . . . none of it is true.” Worse, the “Curb Your Enthusiasm” star says, “the most egregious error was that they had me wearing shorts, an item of clothing that hasn’t been on my body since I started growing hair.” Link

By Craig Silverman | Posted in Newspapers, Online, Wire service | Also tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off

Oprah not tough enough

March 24, 2005 – 8:00 am

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 the claim.

By Craig Silverman | Posted in Fabrication, Newspapers, Wire service | Also tagged , | Comments Off