OOPS . . .
The year in corrections. Kathy English,
You know, as public editor, there is nothing I hate more than having to correct a correction.
Given that we are the department mandated to set things right when mess-ups occur in the Star, it is totally humiliating to screw up a correction. To me, it feels like failure, writ large.
Still, like everyone at the Star, we two in the public editor’s office are just a couple of human beings, and like all human beings tasked with multiple daily demands, we too sometimes make mistakes. And then, we hold ourselves to the same standards of transparency and accountability to which we hold the newsroom and correct ourselves in our daily corrections space. It is painful, but it must be done.
It shames me to fess up to the fact that the public editor’s office accounted for four corrections in 2014 — three of them minor mistakes in corrections or clarifications and one of them a mistake of misunderstanding in my column. Ouch!
Overall, the Star published 428 corrections in 2014 for mistakes that made it into the newspaper and, for the most part, online too. As well, we made a further 385 corrections to digital content.
The 428 print corrections of 2014 are an increase of just over 5 per cent from the 403 mistakes we made right in 2013. The online corrections are down significantly from the 582 online mistakes corrected in 2013.
In 2012, we published 415 corrections in the newspaper. In my nearly eight-year tenure as the Star’s public editor, the highest number of print corrections we have published was 497 in 2007. The lowest was 328 in 2010.
I don’t have any “Correction of the Year” to amuse you with this year, no incredible groaner that makes you and me wonder how on earth such a laughable mistake could make it into Canada’s largest newspaper. Indeed, the Star did not “achieve” the dubious distinction this year of being included in Regret the Error founder Craig Silverman’s annual roundup of “best and worst media errors and corrections.”
The corrections of 2014 are largely the result of common “garden variety” errors such as misspelled and mangled names, wrong dates, wrong numbers, incorrect facts, misquotes and misunderstandings.
In 2014, 97 corrections were done to right misspelled, wrong names, just one less than last year’s 98, despite my constant carping on the need to double-check all names before publishing. Another 61 errors were numbers gone awry. Factual errors included misinformation about geography, history, politics and sports.
The Star told you, erroneously, that Cleveland is located on the southern shore of Lake Ontario. The Star told you, erroneously, that 800 Tutsis and moderate Hutus were murdered in the Rwandan genocide of 1994. As history (and the correction) tells us, the number was devastatingly more — 800,000. The Star told you, erroneously, that Vladimir Putin is prime minister of Russia. Of course, he is president. The Star told you, erroneously, that Wayne Gretzky was the first NHL player to wear No. 99 in the big league. Who knew that Joe Lamb wore it first for the Montreal Canadians back in the 1930s?
What I know is that these are the sort of errors that can erode the credibility of journalists and their news organization and drive readers mad — though, not as much, I’d say, as the all-too-common grammar, usage and spelling errors in the Star. But, that’s another column altogether.
Given the utmost importance of accuracy in journalism, we have taken significant steps in the past year to try to minimize those sorts of factual errors in the Star. Everyone in the newsroom has been given my “accuracy checklists” to assist with the self-editing necessary to minimize the most common types of errors in the Star. All of the items to be double-checked on this checklist correspond to the most common reasons for corrections in the Star and the most common concerns readers bring to the public editor’s office.
A reporter here once told me, after we had corrected a relatively minor error she had made, that she thought every journalist in the newsroom had something to learn from getting a correction of their work in the Star. Indeed, a correction is always a wake-up call of sorts, a reminder of the need to take the utmost care, double-check every fact, make no assumptions.
Nevertheless, it is all too easy for readers to assume that all errors are the result of journalists’ carelessness. I well know that there are many understandable human and systemic reasons why errors occur in the rush to publish on constant deadlines in this era when there is far less copy editing than in the past. Still, we can do better. And yes, that means me too. As always, the Star regrets the errors. publiced@thestar.ca