SOMEONE once told me that the purpose of the corrections newspapers print isn’t so much to fix what was wrong in yesterday’s edition, but to point out that everything else in there was right. Maybe. But the most valuable thing a newspaper has — about the only thing it has to trade on, really — is its integrity, its ability to get things right. And yet, any endeavor that involves people is assured some missteps along the way. People make mistakes. It’s that simple.
Take the case of the man who wrote a fairly flaming e-mail complaining about a sports column he was sure had gone wrong. The e-mailer urged the columnist: “stick to facts you can prove.” Clearly, the man who complained mistook a columnist — a person whose job it is to write opinion — with a reporter — a person whose job requires sticking to facts you can prove, at the very least, sufficiently to convince an editor that you know what you’re talking about.
There were other complaints in that e-mail — many of them — and one generated a correction, as it should have. The columnist clearly misplaced a statement, reporting that it had been said at least a week later than it was. This matters. It was corrected. Many of the rest of the complaints were more about nuance and word choice than fact and so, as is fitting at Mr. Jefferson’s University, were left to compete in the marketplace of ideas on their own.
Ideas and opinions share one bailiwick, but actual facts are another thing altogether and it’s embarrassing to be caught with a looser grip on them than you ought to have. Take a recent headline about a conference. It said the Miller Center was hosting that conference, when, in fact, it was hosted by the Center for Politics. According to the person who politely pointed this out, this confusion has happened before. Perhaps, but not on my watch. At least, if it did, I didn’t notice. But facts are stubborn things and the fact is that the Miller Center and the Center for Politics are two separate organizations. Both are connected to the University, which makes it all the more unfortunate that the University’s newspaper seems to have trouble keeping them straight.
The Miller Center deals with public policy. It’s a place people gather to “research, reflect, and report on issues of national importance to the governance of the United States, with special attention to the central role and history of the presidency.”
The Center for Politics, oddly enough, is all about politics. It is “dedicated to the proposition that government works better when politics works better and its corollary that politics works better when citizens are informed and active participants.”
That reminds me of another recently e-mailed complaint. A story about a survey concerning civic literacy managed to avoid defining the term “civic literacy.” It wasn’t clear exactly who administered the survey. (An institute was named, but no explanation of who they are or where they are institutionalized was offered). There were no examples of the questions asked and no clue who was asked, when they were asked or how they were asked.
Information is a good thing. We should have more of it.
Then there was that unfortunate cut line.
The photo was meant to be a funny little throwaway thing. A statue with a scarf around its neck and a line about windy weather. Even Thomas Jefferson is trying to keep warm, the cut line said. But the photo was of George Washington’s statue. Now, that’s an embarrassing mistake anywhere, but when your newspaper is distributed on The Lawn, it’s mortifying.
Readers look at things like that and wonder, “If they can’t tell Washington from Jefferson; the Miller Center from the Center for Politics, why should I trust what they have to say about student government or the score of last night’s field hockey game?” No one is seriously hurt by something as trivial as misidentifying a sculptured representation of a long-dead politician. But mistakes like that eat away at the trust that a newspaper depends on in its fragile relationship with the community it serves. Those things need to be caught before they get into print.
On the other hand, those of us who aren’t around when the presses roll shouldn’t bask too long or deeply in the schadenfreude such mistakes can generate. People make mistakes. It’s as simple as that. And people make a newspaper. Their goal should always be to make it better.
Tim Thornton is The Cavalier Daily’s ombudsman. He can be reached at ombud@cavalierdaily.com.
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