Thanks, Doug!

The Citizen wishes everyone a safe and enjoyable Halloween. Link

The above was published on the front page of the paper. Note that the Saturday paper is the biggest of the week in Canada, while Sunday editions are often the smallest. It also appears as though the online version of this message went online on Saturday.

Thanks, Doug and Andrew!

*Correction Nov. 4, 2011: The word Ottawa was misspelled as “Otawa” in the original version of this headline. I regret the Error. Thanks, MediaBugs!

Thanks, Doug!

Thanks, Gary!

There were two errors in my column for Jan. 10 — the one that began by quoting Shakespeare: “First let’s kill all the lawyers.” Contrary to appearances, Nancy Pelosi was never a lawyer. And, the U.S. Senate majority leader, though a lawyer, is not “Bill” Reid. I keep confusing him with the famous shoe bomber, and the late illustrious Haida artist, who are Bill, Dick, and Harry (in reverse order). Mea culpa!

This correction is a result of Media Culpa’s efforts.

An article on page F3 yesterday misquoted Dr. Lara de Salaberry, who was commenting on the accumulated effects of stress and other health problems caused by the OC Transpo strike. The correct quote should have read: “Initially, I would have had to lie on an application for people to get Para Transpo.’ Dr. de Salaberry has made it clear to the Citizen that she was referring to what she would have had to do to help her patients obtain Para Transpo services but that she did not lie on any applications for Para Transpo. The Citizen apologizes to Dr. de Salaberry for publishing the incorrect quote.

The offending section:

While many [of her troubled patients] have simply not shown up for their appointments, others have taken drastic steps.
“Initially, I had to lie on an application for people to get Para Transpo,” said Dr. de Salaberry. “But now, it has reached the point where they qualify because the strike really is endangering their health.”

Thanks, Doug!

A banner outside one of Holitzner Homes’ model townhomes in Kanata advertising a $10,000 signing bonus has been in place for a year; it was not put up “before New Year’s.” The Holitzner sales office was closed between Dec. 23 and Jan. 1, which is why there were no visitors to the office over the Christmas period, not because buyers were not in a buying mood during the holidays. Incorrect information appeared Saturday in an article on page I1 and a photo caption on page I2.

Thanks, Doug!

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!

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!

Thanks, Ruth!

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?