Mistakes, Corrections and Hoaxes

Perhaps an editor might divide his paper into four chapters; heading the first, Truths; the second, Probabilities; the third, Possibilities; and fourth, Lies.

Thomas Jefferson

once upon a time, newspapers did not make mistakes. If that reads like the beginning to a fairy tale, that’s because it is one. newspapers did make mistakes; it’s just that they did not admit them – or at least not unless forced to do so by lawyers. For decades, the Press preferred to be confident liars than seekers after the truth.

This pretence of infallibility was absurd. Inaccurate reporting produced (and is producing) millions of wrong details, false accounts and not a few spectacularly duff stories. on the 15 April 1912, for instance, the Baltimore Evening Sun ran a story headlined ‘All Titanic Passengers Safe’. on 3 november 1948, the Chicago Daily Tribune proclaimed ‘Dewey defeats Truman’ and on May 1983, The Times declared all over its front page ‘Hitler’s Secret Diaries to be published’. As contemporaries knew very soon after each of these stories appeared, 1,500 died on the Titanic, Harry Truman beat Dewey and the diaries were not written by Hitler but by a little German crook called Konrad Kujau.

These days, newspapers of quality do admit mistakes and they put them right as soon as they can. They recognise that stories are written by fallible human beings under great pressure and without access to all the sources. Inevitably, some errors will creep in. They fall into one of six categories:

• Errors of detail – names, ages, addresses, etc.

• Errors of narrative – false part of an otherwise true account.

• Hoaxes and inventions – where the entire story is fiction.

• Errors of context – incorrect or missing background causing a false

account.

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• Errors of omission – an account made misleading by a missing part.

• Errors of interpretation – adding two and two and coming up with five. The better papers such as the Chicago Tribune also have a system for recording and tracking mistakes, and attempting to put right any part of their processes that caused the error. Such papers have learnt a great deal about how mistakes arise, and who makes them. And the truth is that no group of journalists produce more errors than reporters. According to surveys carried out at The Guardian and the Fort Worth Star-Telegram in Texas, reporters made half the errors that were published. (copy editors were responsible for about one mistake in five.) This is an important insight for the papers and even more for individual writers; for nothing destroys a reporter’s reputation faster (or more comprehensively) than a record of generating errors. reporters serious about not falling into this category should realise two things. First that the accuracy of their stories is their responsibilty and is not something that can be passed up the production chain to a news editor or copy editor. Second, train yourself to be so aware of how errors creep in that checking for these potential ambushes becomes second nature. learn not just from your mistakes but also from those of others. When you see a correction in a paper, think of how it might have occurred. Mistakes There are 13 main causes of errors in stories: False information from sources With simple facts like names, dates and ages there is said to be not a lot you can do about wrong information. I disagree. You can double-check, ask yourself if the source is in a position to know what they are telling, listen out for the tell-tale clues to uncertainty (‘I think...’, ‘...probably...’, ‘...or so I was told...’, etc.) and ask if the information sounds plausible. often a little reflection will tell you that it does not. A related source of error is to take information given to you (perhaps in the midst of an as-yet unclear situation) and present it as unattributed fact, rather than a sourced contention. This was where the Titanic error was made, because the papers took on trust assurances from the ship’s owners, the White Star line, and did not attribute them when reporting the passengers were all saved.

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Poor note-taking

Shaky notes – from an uncertain shorthand outline to a long-hand word that could be this or could be that – often make shaky stories. Time to brush up on the short-hand or handwriting. And don’t guess what sources meant – ask them again. Few will mind as much as you imagine, if at all. And learn to ask them to spell out, or write down, names.

Failure to double-check ‘facts’ with sources

often one source tells you something that contradicts an earlier source. check it, double check it and triple check it, if necessary. The same applies to working from documents. A few seconds checking that you have copied figures and names correctly will save untold grief.

Wishing something is true

There is, probably, no finer example of this than the events described in a correction published by the Warren, ohio Tribune Chronicle in 2008: ‘It was incorrectly reported in Tuesday’s Tribune Chronicle that Sen Hillary rodham clinton answered questions from voters in a local congressman’s office. reporter John Goodall spoke by telephone with Hillary Wicai viers, who is a communications director in uS rep charlie Wilson’s staff. According to the reporter, when viers answered the phone with “This is Hillary”, he believed he was speaking with the Democratic presidential candidate ... The quotes from viers were incorrectly attributed to clinton.’ oh dear.

Reluctance to check ‘sensational’ facts or developments

There is a smirking part of the culture of journalism which discourages reporters from checking too closely the more outrageous parts of stories, lest someone deny them or water them down. Such perilous idiocy flies in the face of generations of experience, which is that few stories are as straightforward, black and white, or outrageous as they first appear. If you were not born with healthy scepticism, acquire some.

Failure to read a story once written

We all make typing errors when working quickly, and we also have ‘facts’ in our heads that are not borne out by our notes. A read for accuracy (apart from one for style and possible cuts) stops a lot of these errors.

Trusting websites too much

until the early 1990s, getting a news story published required its approval by an editor or two. not any more. now, anyone can start a

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website, post an item on a blog or message board, and watch it take off into global circulation. Thus has been created the biggest hoax and false information machine in history – a 24-hour trap for gullible, desperate, or lazy journalists.

It was a combination of this – plus ignorance of the nature of the source – which led, in 2002, the Beijing Evening News to reproduce as true a story from The onion, the well-known American satirical news site. unaware that The onion specialised in concocting such stories as ‘Apollo 13 Astronauts Drown as Ted Kennedy Flees Splashdown Site’, and ‘nagasaki Bombed Just For The Hell of It’, the Beijing paper took as fact an item that the uS congress – dismayed that there are not enough places to entertain lobbyists in the old capitol building – intends to move to Memphis, home of Elvis Presley, where a new seat of government will be built, complete with luxury hospitality boxes.

Many internet hoaxes stay largely confined to web news sites, like the story a few years ago about the prosecution of Irishman Thomas Mccarney for bringing a donkey into a Galway hotel room. The tale went that the donkey swallowed the room key, ran amok in the corridor, and Mr Mccarney was arrested still wearing his latex nightwear and handcuffs. He was duly charged under the unlawful Accommodation of Donkeys Act of 1837. It was all nonsense, of course, but beautifully constructed, and websites all over the world carried it with no hint that it might be baloney. This despite the fact that the hotel receptionist quoted was a Ms Irina legova – something of a clue.

Failure to listen to your own anxieties about a story

Any experienced reporter knows the feeling of having a ‘sensational’ story, which will make big headlines, but about which they have some anxieties. It does not quite ring true, it does not fit with what you know of the world, etc. The mistake is to charge ahead, afraid that caution will rob you of front page glory. Instead, listen to those doubts. Most of the time they will prove correct. Many of the errors I have made were when my show-off ego would not heed the wise doubts of the sensible little journalist in my head.

Omission of facts not fitting with a pre-conceived (or too-rapidly conceived) theory

Making your mind up about a situation before knowing all the facts (although you can never know all the facts) is one of the great traps a journalist must perpetually fight to avoid. It is an ever-present danger on major incident stories, for there is then great pressure to deliver both a seemingly all-knowing account and a pat explanation for the incident. A

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classic case was the riots at Strangeways Prison in Manchester, described in chapter 10 on Disasters.

Rushing into print too early

This was the mistake with the Hitler Diaries. The anxiety to protect an exclusive property (exacerbated by the belief within news International that, ultimately, entertainment and not truth was the object of journal-ism) meant that the story was published before all the scientific checks were made. This fear of being scooped rushed Murdoch into sanctioning publication, despite strongly expressed misgivings by some of his most senior Sunday Times journalists. The pitfalls of dashing into print with a story that is far more emphatic than the evidence warrants is a frequent cause of major errors on stories large and small. The moral is obvious – publish only that of which you are certain.

(note the absence of fatigue and inexperience from this list. They are not causes of errors, but excuses for them.)

Failure to clear technical material with experts

A young, inexperienced reporter interviews a leading expert about a complex issue in medicine or science. Does she email her copy to the expert before publication to check it is right? not in Britain she doesn’t. There, taking this elementary precaution is seen as a sign of journalistic weakness, and on the first paper I worked for showing your copy to a source was actually a sackable offence. I was always uncomfortable with this ‘don’t show the sources’ policy. And so, in recent years I have taken to emailing a finished story to whoever was its most helpful expert source. (If time was short, I telephoned and read part of it.) The result? A source so pleasantly surprised they became a helpful contact for ever more, the elimination of errors, and the placing of a correct version on the record. Most of the top specialist reporters follow the same policy.

Over-reliance on cuttings

Journalists use cuttings files as a crib more than they admit, and an error made by one reporter can reproduce down the years like a persistent virus. consider this: in 2003, the Virginian-Pilot newspaper carried a light-hearted correction of its original story on the first flight, by the Wright brothers. That 1903 story contained no fewer than 33 errors, quite a few of which, I would guess, have been reproduced down the years by writers going to the Virginian-Pilot cutting. Journalists even make mistakes when reporting their own colleagues. For my book, The Great Reporters, I researched a well-known reporter before interviewing her, and took extensive notes from a recent newspaper profile. Before our