Christopher Hitchens has said that the purpose of putting corrections in a newspaper is not really to correct what the paper got wrong. It's to point out that everything else in the paper was right.
Last week, The Cavalier Daily published a couple of clarifications and one bona fide correction. That's a bad week, even if it does mean that everything else in the paper was right. And it doesn't really mean that.
One of last week's clarifications was about an unusual twist on a common complaint. Rather than a misquote, it was a misattributed quote. What ran in the paper was apparently an accurate recounting of what was said, but the reporter had the wrong person saying it.
Ideally, there would never be any need for any correction in any newspaper. And some people may say the ever expanding list of errors and misinterpretations explains why newspapers have fallen on such hard times. Those people have a narrow, yet twisted view of the world.
The quaint journalistic custom of printing corrections is really a covenant with readers. It says that the folks who put out the paper will do their best to record things as accurately as they can. And when those folks fail, they'll take another crack at it.
It's mostly a newspaper thing.
A former colleague of mine once noticed that a caption in a television story misspelled the name of the principle character in the story. When my colleague asked the television reporter involved what TV people do about things like that, the TV guy smiled.
"It's like writing on water," he said.
Corrections are rare among broadcast and online news sources. It's not because they don't make mistakes. It's because they rarely acknowledge mistakes. That's not just my opinion, it's the observation of Craig Silverman, a journalist and author responsible for regrettheerror.com and the book Regret the Error. Silverman collects and publishes egregious errors, outright lies and amusing corrections.
Dave Berry got Silverman's correction of the year award for this gem:\n
In yesterday's column about badminton, I misspelled the name of Guatemalan player Kevin Cordon. I apologize. In my defense, I want to note that in the same column I correctly spelled Prapawadee Jaroenrattanatarak, Poompat Sapkulchananart and Porntip Buranapraseatsuk. So by the time I got to Kevin Cordon, my fingers were exhausted.
Silverman was much less amused by this front page correction in a United Kingdom newspaper:\n
The Daily Express has taken the unprecedented step of making a front-page apology to Kate and Gerry McCann.
\nWe did so because we accept that a number of articles in the newspaper have suggested that the couple caused the death of their missing daughter Madeleine and then covered it up.
\nWe acknowledge that there is no evidence whatsoever to support this theory and that Kate and Gerry are completely innocent of any involvement in their daughter's disappearance.
\nWe trust that the suspicion that has clouded their lives for many months will soon be lifted.
\nAs an expression of its regret, the Daily Express has now paid a very substantial sum into the Madeleine Fund and we promise to do all in our power to help efforts to find her.
\nKate and Gerry, we are truly sorry to have added to your distress.
\nWe assure you that we hope Madeleine will one day be found alive and well and will be restored to her loving family.
The problems with that "correction" are obvious enough. But at least it did more or less set the record straight.
A paper I used to read regularly ran a story under a headline that said a particular university continued to rise in the U.S. News & Report rankings. Though you couldn't tell it from the headline or the story, the school actually fell a notch.
Later that week, the same paper published a column attacking a legislator and his legislation for what the columnist considered a flaw in state law. In real life, the flaw predated the legislation by a decade or more.
That Friday, I went to a high school football game. Saturday morning's paper got the score wrong.
As far as I know, the paper hasn't admitted or corrected any of those errors. That's a good way to lose readers' confidence. Admitting errors - and correcting them - shouldn't be seen as a negative thing. It's a responsible thing to do.
When we were children, we may have believed that grownups were omniscient and infallible. Now that we're grownups, we know that's not true. So it shouldn't come as a shock that a newspaper's staff is neither omniscient nor infallible. As readers, when we see an error, we should point it out, so it can be corrected. That's fair. And fairness is more than grown-ups can reasonably expect from most things in life.
Tim Thornton is The Cavalier Daily's ombudsman. He can be reached at ombud@cavalierdaily.com
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