Tag Archives: ottawa citizen

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 (0)

Mea culpa, mea culpa

March 4, 2008 – 8:00 am

Ottawa Citizen columnist David Warren has had to backtrack on claims made in a couple of recent columns. From February 20:

A retraction. In my Sunday column, I wrote in passing about the kind of Shariah practised in Iran, “where a little boy caught stealing gets an arm amputated under the wheel of a truck.” Many, many, horrible things happen under Shariah in Iran, but that event, widely disseminated on the Internet with photos, wasn’t one of them. The photos were of a (disagreeable) magic act in that country, and the wrong captioning was exposed on the Little Green Footballs website, just after they first appeared, three years ago. Should have checked. Link

January 23:

Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa. Normally the pundit who has committed a factual error leaves the correction to the shortest possible postscript at the end of his next column. But I’ve decided to lead with mine today. Not because the mistake was so ghastly - though it was pretty ghastly - but because it was instructive.
We’ve been discussing free speech and free press, lately, in the encroaching darkness of “political correction.” In Saturday’s column, I touched on the efforts made by various faculty and students at the university called La Sapienza in Rome, to prevent Pope Benedict from delivering an address at the opening of term. I said he was intending to discuss the famous trial of Galileo. I got this little nugget from mainstream media, who gathered it from the anti-papal propaganda. The pope had cancelled his appearance, to avoid a pointless confrontation with people I compared to howler monkeys (see below). But he was publishing the speech so anyone with a genuinely open mind could read it.
Imagine my surprise, when the speech came out on the Internet. It did not even mention Galileo. I’d been busily defending the pope, in advance, for something he wasn’t even going to say.
…But mea culpa. Had only I checked with the Vatican, on what the pope’s speech was going to be about, I could have avoided the trap of believing what I’d heard from those “howler monkeys.” The lesson, which I thought I’d long since learned, is never take anything at face value, no matter how many times it is repeated in the media. Link

Thanks, Carol!

By Craig Silverman | Posted in Newspapers | Also tagged | Comments (0)

Apology

February 8, 2008 – 8:00 am

In an article on page A10 of the Jan. 30 edition of the Citizen, a number of inaccurate statements were made about Ottawa surgeon Dr. Joel Freeman.
Dr. Freeman was never convicted of any offence over an alleged road rage incident in September 2004 and received an absolute discharge after pleading guilty to the charge of assault in April 2006. At that time, Dr. Freeman was acquitted of a charge of assault with a weapon, and a charge of possession of a weapon for a dangerous purpose was withdrawn by the Crown, after no evidence was led that he held a closed pocket knife during the incident. Further, Dr. Freeman was not forced to resign his privileges at The Ottawa Hospital but did so voluntarily in June 2005.
The Citizen apologizes to Dr. Freeman for any harm caused by these errors. Link

Thanks, Ruth!

By Craig Silverman | Posted in Major Errors, Newspapers | Also tagged , | Comments (0)

Ottawa Citizen photo error mistakes innocent man for convicted pedophile

May 17, 2007 – 1:18 pm

Big, bad error in the Ottawa Citizen this week.
Yesterday it ran a major story on the front of its City section stating that a man had been convicted for a fourth time of sexually assaulting a minor. At the center of the above-fold story was a picture of the accused. Well, a picture the paper thought was of the accused. In reality, it showed a completely innocent man who has the misfortune of bearing a name similar to that of the convicted pedophile. The paper today ran a large apology on the front of its City section to try and clear the man’s name. An embarrassing error for the paper, a tragic mistake for the innocent man.
The paper did the right thing by placing the apology in a location that is commensurate with the original story, though a strong argument can be made for putting it on the front page. The paper should also consider running it for more than one day, just to ensure readers don’t miss it. And one thing missing from the apology is an explanation of how the error occurred.
Images of the original story and two of the resulting apology are below (click for larger). We also have two other recent Citizen corrections/apologies of note underneath them.

We also located this recent Citizen Clarification and Apology from May 12:

The headline on an article published March 14 might have given some readers the mistaken impression that Abdullah Almalki was implicated in a U.S. court case in which Mohamad Elzahabi is on trial for allegedly making a false statement to FBI agents during a terrorism investigation. Mr. Elzahabi is not on trial for any terrorism-related offence. Mr. Almalki has been asked to give evidence relevant to the allegedly false statement. The Citizen article was never intended to suggest that Mr. Almalki is a terrorist or is linked to any terrorism
trials. The Citizen regrets any confusion caused by the headline, and apologizes to Mr. Almalki for any distress the Citizen may have caused him.

UPDATE: A reader just reminded us of a similar Citizen photo error from January when the paper mistakenly identified a murder victim’s son as the accused. Time to reexamine those photo policies, perhaps?

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