What’s the point of papers printing corrections if they don’t own up to the mistake?
There is a dark journalistic art known as the correction.
It may appear to readers as an example of transparency on the part of the newspaper when those short paragraphs pop up clarifying some apparently minor matter. It’s not.
Of course the hidden game is to correct that fact, while leaving the poor old reader none the wiser what the error was in the first place.
Take today’s on page 2 of the Sydney Morning Herald:
“Yesterday’s sports report ‘Not a whole lot of shaking going on in twisted love triangle’ should have referred to the British politician Alistair darling as a Labour MP”
It’s a classic of its genre – no reader looking at that today could possibly guess the mistake. Which for the record was that yesterday the newspaper described an encounter in the EPL “as if this were Tory Alistair Darling versus Labour’s Gordon Brown”.
In fact, both politicians are ministers in the British government.
By the looks of the same report that appears online in the UK’s The Guardian, it was an error introduced locally.
The problem I have with this sort of non-correction is the way it treats readers. It feels like they’re being deliberately misled by omission.
Sometimes, there’s a legal reason. Last night’s Media Watch on the ABC ran a piece on an equally mysterious corrrection in Saturday’s Daily Telegraph in Sydney about a far more serious matter.
I vageuly remember seeing that correction at the weekend without remembering the original story and assuming there’d been a minor subbing blunder. Not least because of the unenlightening phrase: “The error was made during the production process and not by the author.”
Having seen Media Watch, I now realise this was a huge howler which the correction disguised.
So while the Tele correction may have been to fend off a legal issue or perhaps a future Australian Press Council ruling, it was certainly not about making the readers better informed.
More puzzling though is correction of the SMH type discussed above. What makes newspapers, or rather journalists, behave like that?
Partly, I think it’s ego. Believe it or not, most journalists actually don’t like making mistakes, and they hate even more to go through the embarrassment of admitting them.
And partly, it’s just ingrained habit. It’s how it’s always been.
I’ve previously edited four different magazines in three different parts of the world. Before that I was on a couple of papers’ news desks. In every case, corrections were always a fight with the journos involved – particularly if you let the person who had made a mistake write the correction.
I’d make the argument that properly informing the readers of the small number of mistakes we inevitably made would give them greater confidence in the title’s content as a whole.
It was an approach inspired by The Guardian’s readers’ editor – an independent ombudsman who handled such matters on behalf of the readership. Consequently, the Guardian’s corrections slot is high profile, informative and enhances rather than detracts from the newspaper’s reputation.
But it needs a culture shift to do that. Newspapers need to stop treating readers like idiots who can be fooled or ignored.
Tim Burrowes
Tim Burrowes founded Mumbrella in 2008. He worked on Mumbrella until 2021. At various points he was editor, content director and editor-at-large.
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Thank you for taking up the issue of corrections. I would love to see a more transparent and accountable system for corrections adopted by Australian media – particularly online where mistakes can just “disappear” …
I do have to beg to differ with your experience of corrections. When I was reporting, I was scrupulous about pursuing corrections (how else do you rebuild your credibility after a stuff up?), and it was often layer upon layer upon layer of section editor and online editor who needed to be goaded to actually get the correction up and online ASAP.
In fact, it was a really botched correction on a story I wrote for the Next section of the Age (while it was still a proper enterprise IT section) which made me give up on freelancing for Fairfax. The error (mangling and mis-attribution of a quote, introduced presuambly by a sub) made it to the print & online issue. It was serious enough that they printed a correction the following week – it was just a pity that they also bungled the correction. Just ridiculous, and I as the freelance writer was the one who spotted the error, chased the section editor & online editor for a correction, and then pointed out the error in the correction. Noone seemed to give a toss but me, and it’s my reputation as a writer which is cheapened when these mistakes end up in print/online.
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My many, many years in the newspaper industry has seen a battle for corrections on every occasion.
It is time that papers are made to republish the story in its entirety and alongside it publish the correction, also it should be run on the same page and in the same font/style that the original story ran.
At the very least, the correction should point to the website where the story and correction should be published together.
At a time when papers are telling the world that they are relevant due to the quality of their journalism, this would no doubt lead to an increase in “responsible journalism”.
All of the above should also apply to websites etc.
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Ah, the pulling out of a sub as fault-taker. ‘Cause there’s no such thing as a journalist’s fuck-up, right?
Come on.
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Good article – i was only pondering this myself after watching Media Watch.
There’s a reason corrections appear on Page 2 – newspaper staff secretly hope no one will notice them (even if the humungous error was on page 1, 3 or 5, you will never see a correction appear where the offending item first appeared).
Journalists like to think of themselves as God-like creatures with higher intellects than the average Joe, and incapable of mistakes – that is why winkling an apology out of a newspaper is such a harrowing exercise for the aggrieved/maligned party.
If more corrections were run clearly, promptly and in context, you might find readership growing instead of declining.
These days a growing distrust of mainstream media is part of what’s fuelling newspaper circulation/readership issues.
They can’t blame it all on the Internet!
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