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:
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.
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.
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.
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!