Why do we bother to correct errors?

In a recent Washington Post column, the eminent editor and essayist Michael Kinsley argued that newspapers overdo it when it comes to correcting small errors. Kinsley mocks the New York Times for its attention to correcting such trivia as the name of a company called Voxox (it had been printed as “Vovox”) or that of the College of William & Mary (misprinted as William and Mary College):

Although the purpose of [the daily Corrections column] is to demonstrate the Times’s rectitude about taking facts seriously, the facts it corrects are generally so bizarre or trivial and its tone so schoolmarmish that the effect is to make the whole pursuit of factual accuracy seem ridiculous.

“Bizarre or trivial”? Really? I think these goofs look rather different to the folks at Voxox or the College of William & Mary. And the importance of correcting them lies not in some earth-shattering import to the facts themselves but rather in the bond of trust that is established when a publication is seen to care enough to correct them — and, inversely, the loss of trust that occurs when the publication doesn’t bother.

Remember that, for Joe at Voxox or Sue at William & Mary, the misspelled name isn’t just a tiny fact in a sea of information; it represents that person’s point of maximum contact with the publication. Each time these people think of that newspaper or magazine they’re going to remember, These are the folks who couldn’t even get my name right. Multiply that by all the careless errors that get made in the course of normal journalism and you can get some insight into why public trust in the media has been on a downhill curve for so many years.

On the Web, of course, when these errors happen, we get to talk back, and share our discontent, and begin to see that it is not uncommon.

Kinsley maintains that most gripes with the news are driven by partisanship:

The fad for elaborate and abject corrections, and factual accuracy in general, is based on the misperception that when people complain about the media getting it all wrong, what bothers them is that the newspaper identified the mountain inside Denali National Park as Mount Denali (as it is “referred to by many,” the Times defensively put it the other day) and not by its official name of Mount McKinley, which “has not been officially changed.” Nor do they care whether a reporter “misstated the size of the National Hockey League when Ed Johnston — a retired goaltender who is a proponent of safer headgear — helped the Boston Bruins win Stanley Cup titles in 1970 and 1972.” What bothers people is the refusal of the Times and other papers to call President Obama a socialist or a Muslim, or to say outright that talk radio hosts are vermin. In short, most complainers tend to be ideologues whose vision of an accurate newspaper is far different from that of the professionals.

Certainly, the Web teems with angry people on both left and right who are unhappy with the media. Satisfying any of them is an uphill and perhaps futile effort. But there’s a much wider population that has lost faith in the media for the simpler reason that, in their experience, reporters simply get too much wrong. It is for those people that the managing editors of the world devote a portion of their time and energy to fixing the spellings of names and other minor goofs — and coming clean about those fixes.

If your newsroom doesn’t make a commitment to fixing such errors publicly, then people will stop bothering to report them to you. They’ll assume you don’t care, and they’ll be correct. This downward spiral has already begun in many communities.

Our hope in starting MediaBugs is to begin the painstaking work of reversing this dynamic. We don’t think that it will be fast or easy. It’s a lot more difficult to win trust than to lose it. But it’s worth the effort!

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Comments

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  2. I think it’s so important to get spelling of proprietary names (and other proper nouns) correct in media print these days. -especially in the web era when if your article does not have a link, the first thing a reader is going to do is Google the name for more info. Like in programming, these proprietary names are tokens, linking customer and public interest even without the hrefs because of great advances in web indexing. If someone takes the time to reference somone/thing, then they should do it right!

Trackbacks

  1. […] rather than getting into whether it’s important for such errors to be corrected (see here and here for why we believe it is), a simple question instead: why does it have to be so hard to get an […]

  2. […] In an old post (but worth the read), Scott Rosenberg of MediaBugs.org highlights one of the reasons why corrections are important, focusing on two New York Times corrections of Voxox (originally reported as “Vovox”) and the College of William & Mary (originally printed as “William and Mary College”): the importance of correcting them lies not in some earth-shattering import to the facts themselves but rather in the bond of trust that is established when a publication is seen to care enough to correct them — and, inversely, the loss of trust that occurs when the publication doesn’t bother. […]