Regret the Error

My weekly Columbia Journalism Review online column is live on the site. The topic: obiticide. Death by media. An excerpt:

Death by Obiticide

I have some bad news to pass along this week: two people were killed as a result of sloppy journalism.

It happens more often than you might expect. It’s frequent enough, in fact, that I’ve come up with a name for this phenomenon: obiticide. Death by media error.

Newsday was one of the guilty parties, as evidenced by this correction:

In an article published yesterday about autism, some editions reported incorrectly that Vito “Billy” Albanese Jr. died at an out-of-state residential facility. Albanese is living in Brooklyn with his father.

British paper The Observer also published a correction to atone for shunting Ted Sorensen into an early grave:

Ted Sorensen, the author of Counselor, was unfortunately described as ‘the late’ in our Books pages last week; we are happy to report that John F Kennedy’s adviser and speechwriter is still very much with us. And Julia Blackburn, not Blackwell, wrote The Three of Us, published by Cape (Books, last week). Apologies.

Sorensen is something of a mistake magnet. Last year, The New York Times admitted that it had misspelled his name more than 135 times over the last fifty-plus years. If given the choice, though, Sorensen probably prefers having his name mangled to being knocked off. Still, he’s in good company. This Wikipedia page shows just how many famous people have been felled before their time by premature obituaries.

I dedicated an entire chapter of my book to obiticide (and you can read a chapter excerpt here), but that’s hardly put the issue to rest. Just this past year, newspapers have killed off Frank McCourt, Billy Graham (twice!), Muhammad Ali, Pat Robertson and Victor Willis of Village People fame. (Okay, it’s a bit of a stretch to include the last one.) …