Update September 26, 2011: Romenesko notes that Fox aired an apology during yesterday’s NFL broadcast:

Before we move on, I want to go back to Week 1, during the Atlanta-Chicago broadcast, when our production crew that was doing that game displayed an incorrect graphic. Now, the production team told our announcer Daryl Johnston that a taped video package that made air came from actual headlines concerning Bears quarterback Jay Cutler’s performance during last year’s NFC Championship Game. While in fact, they were not. FOX Sports regrets this mistake and apologizes to Cutler, the Chicago Bears organization and everyone involved.

… Poynter’s Kelly McBride, who regularly gets phone calls from editors seeking advice on how to handle plagiarism/fabrication cases, said she found that more newsrooms started firing staffers for plagiarism following the Blair scandal. That seems to have changed once the economic crisis hit newsrooms.

– via Have newsrooms relaxed standards, sanctions for fabrication and plagiarism?, a report by Mallary Tenore of Poynter. Also see her related piece that looks at how some plagiarism and fabrication cases were handled.

One thing that isn’t addressed in these otherwise interesting and useful articles is the need to examine the previous work of someone caught plagiarizing. Too many news organizations fail to take this essential step when deciding how to handle an incident.

Jon Krakauer’s Three Cups of Deceit—his thorough, intricate takedown of Greg Mortenson’s fraudulent book and charity—has been downloaded 70,000 times by users of byliner.com. That’s terrific news in more ways than one. The problem is, Mortenson’s first book sold more than four million copies. Math isn’t my strongest suit—that would be my reasoned, measured approach to criticism—but I believe that’s a ratio of about 57-to-1 between the fabulists and the factualists.

Unfortunately, it feels more and more like fiction is winning the war against non-fiction, that sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph, lies have been slowly eroding the truth. Mortenson is probably the biggest name to have been exposed for his expansive imagination, but he’s far from alone in using it. In fact, the non-fiction book industry in particular seems poised for a steroids-and-baseball kind of reckoning.

… Maybe it’s time that the truth become a weapon instead. Maybe Krakauer’s takedown of Mortenson is the start of a larger correction. Maybe this business needs a few more heads on the pikes at the castle gates. It will be a painful and ugly and possibly futile process. But if baseball’s experience taught us anything, it’s that playing make-believe can last only so long. Slowly, eventually, inevitably, the numbers put to lie the fantasy. Once they become lop-sided enough, once the math stops adding up, the numbers become all the proof you really need.

–via Son of Bold Venture, the blog written by Esquire writer extraordinaire Chris Jones.

A Bad Byline

From a report on WQAD.com:

The Western Courier is an award-winning newspaper at Western Illinois University that takes pride in its publication. The paper comes out three times a week and usually without any major problems.

But on the back page of Monday's issue, a glaring error: a vulgar typo in the byline of a sports story, dubbing the writer a "bad mother [expletive]."

"In any newsroom situation, it's a highly stressful situation. Jokes are made sometimes to defuse that stress and make everybody feel a little more comfortable," said Western Courier editor-in-chief Ed Komenda. "That byline was in the template for years before I started, and it just so happens it got printed accidentally."

Komenda said he sees the typo as a mistake he clearly wished wouldn't have been made …

Read the paper's apology here.

A Tabloid Reporter's Confession

Richard Peppiat was until recently a reporter for the Daily Star, a tabloid paper published by U.K. media mogul and former pornographer Richard Desmond. Rather than just resigning and quietly moving on, Peppiatt went out in a blaze of glory by writing a scathing resignation email that was subsequently published by the Guardian. The email accused the paper of fabricating reporting and pursuing an anti-Muslim agenda.* (I wrote about the resignation in my weekly Toronto Star column.). From the email:

… as a young hack keen to prove his worth I threw myself into working at the Daily Star with gusto. On order I dressed up as a John Lennon, a vampire, a Mexican, Noel Gallagher, Saint George (twice), Santa Claus, Aleksandr the Meerkat, the Stig, and a transvestite Alex Reid.

I've been spraytanned, waxed, and in a kilt clutching roses trawled a Glasgow council estate trying to propose to Susan Boyle (I did. She said no).

When I was ordered to wear a burkha in public for the day, I asked: "Just a head scarf or full veil?" Even after being ambushed by anti-terror cops when panicked Londoners reported "a bloke pretending to be a Muslim woman", I didn't complain. Mercifully, I'd discovered some backbone by the time I was told to find some burkha-clad shoppers (spot the trend?) to pose with for a picture – dressed in just a pair of skintight M&S underpants.

Forget journalistic merit, I heard this was just an ill-conceived ploy to land an advertising contract with the chain. Admittedly, that was unusual. Often we hacks write vacuous puff pieces about things you own. Few would deny there's one hell of an incestuous orgy of cross-promotion to leer at down at Northern & Shell HQ.

Never mind that it insults the intelligence of amoebas when your readers are breathlessly informed the week's telly highlights include OK! TV and the Vanessa Feltz Show.

I suspect you see a perfect circle. I see a downward spiral. I see a cascade of shit pirouetting from your penthouse office, caking each layer of management, splattering all in between.

Daily Star favourite Kelly Brook recently said in an interview: "I do Google myself. Not that often, though, and the stories are always rubbish. "There was a story that I'd seen a hypnotherapist to help me cut down on the time I take to get ready to go out. Where do they get it from?"

Maybe I should answer that one. I made it up. Not that it was my choice; I was told to. At 6pm and staring at a blank page I simply plucked it from my arse. Not that it was all bad. I pocketed a £150 bonus. You may have read some of my other earth-shattering exclusives.

'Michael Jackson to attend Jade Goody's funeral'. (He didn't.) 'Robbie pops 'pill at heroes concert'. (He didn't either.) 'Matt Lucas on suicide watch'. (He wasn't.) 'Jordan turns to Buddha.' (She might have, but I doubt it.)

I know showbiz is the sand on which your readership is built. And while I didn't write tittle-tattle dreaming of Pulitzers, I never knew I'd fear a Booker Prize nomination instead …

Correction March 14, 2011: This post originally referred to an "anti-Muslin agenda," instead of an "anti-Muslim agenda." Thanks to the commenters and @mattgauk for spotting this amusing typo.

A Radio Host's Meltdown

Courtesy of the great Montreal blogger Fagstein, here's Marco Campagna of The Team 990 in Montreal getting a little upset over some technical difficulties ("Nothing fucking works!"):

Reading a home is something of an art form. Keith Matthews (not his real name) gestures at a large brick home on a snowy North Toronto street with the blinds pulled partially back. “You can tell no one’s in there,” he says. “You see the living room on the right-hand side, the kitchen area on this side. They do have the laundry going, so they’re going to be back soon. You can see the exhaust on the side. That’s their laundry.” He points to the side door, which is obscured from view by a row of cedar trees, as his likely point of entry.

Here's Torontoist's explanation of how the magazine changed the graph for each edition:

… So begins the cover story of Post City Magazine's March issue. The article appears in the North Toronto edition of the magazine—which publishes seven different editions every month, each based in a different part of the city—and is titled "Break-In All the Rules: Confessions of a Rosedale Burglar."

Unless you live around the north part of Bayview. There the article is titled "Break-In All the Rules: Confessions of a Bayview Burglar." In Thornhill it's "Confessions of a Thornhill Burglar" and in the opening sentence, Keith Matthews is gesturing "at a large brick home on a snowy Thornhill street." In the Forest Hill edition he's on a Forest Hill street, and in North York it's a North York street.

This burglar gets around.

The article, it turns out, is the cover story of all seven March 2011 editions of Post City, and seems identical in every respect—except for the pesky question of just where in Toronto Matthews is speaking from. The house in front of which he is standing is described precisely the same way across the board: in each version of the article the living room is on the right-hand side, the laundry is going, and the home's side door is obscured by what sounds like the same row of cedar trees. Even though the house is supposed to be in six different places.

All told, Matthews stands—or at least is described as standing—in front of six houses, on six different snowy streets: Forest Hill, North Toronto, North York, Richmond Hill, Thornhill, and the generic "snowy neighbourhood street" (which is cited in the Midtown and Bayview editions). The title changes a full seven times, with the subject being described as a "Forest Hill Burglar," "Thornhill Burglar," and so on, all the way down the list …

Torontoist sought comment from the magazine's editor but didn't hear back. The magazine did, however, append a note to the online version:

In our March cover story, Break-In All the Rules, Post City Magazines acknowledges the writer and the burglar did visit specific streets in each of the seven neighbourhoods. The burglar in question did commit several robberies in all of these areas. While correct in our North York, Midtown and Bayview editions, Post City Magazines made the mistake of presenting this same street in the North Toronto, Village, Thornhill & Richmond Hill print editions. The writer was not responsible for the error, which was made during production and which we regret.

However, lessons learned from the investigation are valid lessons right across the city regardless of where one lives. The story is no less important and timely for our readers and homeowners across Toronto.

So, if the lessons are valid regardless of where the scene took place, then the magazine didn't need to fabricate the location. Which makes its actions all the more unacceptable…

Thanks, Mondoville!

Freelance writer Rob Sgobbo's article "For-Profit Blues" was removed from the website after the Voice learned that Sgobbo had invented a character, "Tamicka Bourges," who claimed she had amassed a large debt at Berkeley College without obtaining a degree.

We first learned that there might be a problem when Berkeley College denied that one of its spokespersons, Kelly Meisberger, had spoken to Sgobbo. Berkeley later added that it had no record of Bourges as a student. At about the same time, the GAO called to inform us that there was no spokesperson there named "Matt Fraser," whom the story quoted.

The Voice apologizes sincerely to Berkeley College and the GAO that this false material appeared in our education supplement.

*Correction January 7: The original version of this post, which was online for less than five minutes, reported that Sgobbo is a student at Columbia. As noted by Romenesko, he is a graduate of that school's journalism program.

Tuesday marked the 30th anniversary of the day these words appeared on a front page of the Sunday Washington Post:

"Jimmy is 8 years old and a third-generation heroin addict, a precocious little boy with sandy hair, velvety brown eyes and needle marks freckling the baby-smooth skin of his thin brown arms.

"He nestles in a large, beige reclining chair in the living room of his comfortably furnished home in Southeast Washington. There is an almost cherubic expression on his small, round face as he talks about life — clothes, money, the Baltimore Orioles and heroin. He has been an addict since the age of 5.

"His hands are clasped behind his head, fancy running shoes adorn his feet, and a striped Izod T-shirt hangs over his thin frame. 'Bad, ain't it,' he boasts to a reporter visiting recently. 'I got me six of these.'"

It was an anniversary most would like to forget. "Jimmy's World" was all a fabrication, created by reporter Janet Cooke, who went on to win a Pulitzer Prize that the Post was forced to return.

Thirty years later, Cooke's name is synonymous with the hoax she created. Her story is taught in journalism schools, and some say a portion of the damage she wreaked on the credibility of the news media remains.

"How could she do it? I still don't understand that," Benjamin C. Bradlee, the Post's executive editor at the time, told Journal-isms on Wednesday. "She was just one in a million."

He noted that the Post has had no similar incidents since, and that while today's news industry has its woes, cases like Cooke's are thankfully not among them.

Still, asked whether the Cooke affair and its aftermath continue to resonate, Bradlee confessed, "They do in my soul." …

– via Cooke's Hoax Still Resonates After 30 Years | The Maynard Institute.

Washington Post columnist Mike Wise had a point he wanted to make about the declining standards of the media. He made that point in the worst way imaginable: By making up a phony "scoop" and posting it on Twitter.

It all started early Monday afternoon, when Wise tweeted that he had been told the NFL would suspend Pittsburgh Steelers quarterback Ben Roethlisberger for five games.

"Roethlisberger will get five games, I'm told," Wise tweeted in a short missive that would have been major news in the NFL, if it were true.

About an hour later, Wise revealed that it wasn't true. He tweeted sarcastically that his source was "a casino employee in Lake Tahoe" (a tasteless joke about the fact that a casino employee in Lake Tahoe has accused Roethlisberger of raping her), and he said on his radio show (which was airing at the same time that he was tweeting) that he made the whole thing up.

His reason, Wise said, was to prove that "anybody will print anything."

– via Washington Post's Mike Wise Fabricates Story to Prove Point — Back Porch FanHouse.

Update September 7, 2010: The Post's ombudsman wrote a column about the incident and Wise went on "On the Media" and "Reliable Sources" to explain himself. I also wrote my recent CJR column about this.

Here are the offending sentences (from the cached version):

Fabricated interviews. The New Yorker carried a trio of pieces about an Italian journalist caught fabricating a surprisingly large amount of interviews with famous writers. And a German magazine also admitted that it had published a fabricated interview with Beyonce.

Plagiarism at the New York Times. The NYTPicker busted Times art Benjamin Genocchio critic for lifting from Wikipedia.

More Posner theft. Admitted serial plagiarist Gerald Posner is still making news. The Miami New Times uncovered more than 15 other examples of thievery.

(Also see the What I’m Reading sidebar to the right to check out some other recent articles of note.)

January

None!

February

New York Daily News reporter Rosemary Black stole two paragraphs and two quotes from a story published on the front page of the San Antonio Express-News. Link

Barney Gimbel, a writer with Fortune magazine, resigned after being shown evidence that he had plagiarized from an article in the New York Times Magazine. Link

March

None!

April

Erwin James, the nom de plume used by a convicted murderer who writes regularly for the Guardian, admitted that he fabricated parts of a 2006 Guardian article about his experiences in the Foreign Legion. Link

*A student named Nicole Sobel plagiarized several sections of a New York Times op-ed for her column in the University of Massachusetts Daily Collegian. She was subsequently removed from the paper’s staff and the paper apologized. Link

May

Maureen Dowd admitted to a using a sentence taken from Talking Points Memo. She later explained that the words had been provided by a “friend,” suggesting that she meant to copy it from him/her. Link

June

Toledo Free Press columnist Maggie Thurber resigned after one of her columns was found to have included plagiarized material. Link

Wired magazine editor Chris Anderson admitted that a “screwup” resulted in his book, Free, including multiple passages lifted from Wikipedia. Link

Kris DeRego, the news editor at Ka Leo, the student paper at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, was fired after the paper looked through his previous work and found a trail of fabricated sources. Link

July

Hailey Mac Arthur, a college student doing a summer internship at the Colorado Springs Gazette, was fired after the paper discovered she repeatedly plagiarized from the New York Times. Link

Cotswold Life magazine apologized after revealing that its January and February issues included material taken from SoGlos.com. Link

The New York Times Magazine published an editors’ note to detail that a feature by Charles Siebert included language taken from an email message. Critics were quick to note that a similar transgression by Maureen Dowd resulted in a correction, rather than an editors’ note. Link

The Times (U.K.) apologized after an article failed to attribute information to Cornerstone, the magazine of the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings. Link

The Telegraph-Journal of New Brunswick issued a front page apology to admit that it fabricated an accusation against the Canadian prime minister. Then, in September, it apologized to Monsignor Brian Henneberry for fabricating a quote from him in the same report.

August

None!

September

The Telegraph-Journal of New Brunswick apologized after Cheryl Norrad, a “contract writer,” plagiarized a story from the province’s French-language daily newspaper. Link

Pakistani scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan, known for playing a significant role in nuclear proliferation, was found to have plagiarized in a column he wrote for The News. Link

After facing a barrage of criticism, the Hartford Courant apologized for repeatedly and knowingly plagiarizing the work of its competitors. It was later sued by another paper. Link

October

None!

November

The Guardian published a correction to note that it “failed to acknowledge South Africa’s Sunday Times as the source of an article about a passenger on a South African air force flight who was catapulted into the sky when his ejector seat fired.” Link

December

Mona Sarika, a freelance writer, was revealed to be a serial plagiarist. Her work for Foreign Policy, the Huffington Post, and the Wall Street Journal included stolen (and fabricated) material. Link

*Editor’s Note: This entry was added on the afternoon of Dec. 16. Thanks, Steve!

A Nov. 10 “New Global Indian” online column by New York City freelance writer Mona Sarika has been found to contain information that was plagiarized from several publications, including the Washington Post, Little India, India Today and San Francisco magazine. In the column, “Homeward Bound,” about H-1B visa holders returning to India, Ms. Sarika also re-used direct quotes from other publications, without attribution, and changed the original speakers’ names to individuals who appear to be fabricated. The column is the only work by Ms. Sarika to be published by the Journal, and it has been removed from the Journal’s Web sites.

A person named Mona Sarika, who also identifies herself as a NYC-based freelancer, blogs for the Huffington Post. Her name also appears at other publications, all of whom should review her previous work.

UPDATE Dec. 6: HuffPo and Foreign Policy, two publications that published work by Sarika, have removed her articles. Here’s the notice from Foreign Policy:

In her Oct. 30, 2009 article for ForeignPolicy.com, “Pakistan’s Coming Horror,” freelance writer Mona Sarika plagiarized and misattributed quotes from these sources (1, 2) on the BBC’s Web site and, we believe, may have fabricated her interview subjects. We have pulled the article and will not run work by Ms. Sarika again. We apologize to our readers. —Foreign Policy

And here’s what HuffPo has placed where Sarika’s blog posts once appeared:

Editor’s Note: Due to repeated instances of plagiarism and misattribution, both on HuffPost and elsewhere, Mona Sarika’s work will no longer appear on The Huffington Post.

And here’s a statement that Mario Ruiz, vice president of media relations at Huffington Post, told Virginia M. Moncrieff for a post that appears on, yes, the Huffington Post:

“Once we establish that a story or blog post has been plagiarized, we remove the story from our site and revoke the plagiarist’s right to ever post on The Huffington Post again. We also remove all other posts by that blogger and add a note as to why we’ve done so.”

“This has actually been a very rare occurrence over the four-and-a-half years we’ve been publishing,” he said. “Our policy on any factual inaccuracy (not just plagiarism) is that any time the factual accuracy of a post is called into question, a blogger has 24 hours to either back up their facts or correct the error. If they don’t, their blogging privileges will be revoked.”

That’s an interesting bit of insight into how HuffPo handles accusations of inaccuracy. But one thing that Ruiz doesn’t mention is the site’s policy for acknowledging errors. In this case, it provided an editor’s note, but the note doesn’t detail exactly what was wrong with Sarika’s work on HuffPo. What did she plagiarize, and what was misattributed?

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.

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?