Real news admits its mistakes

In an episode of the marvelous “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel,” about a controversial, fictional female comedian in the early 1960s, Midge Maisel’s brilliant but extraordinarily neurotic father, Abe, goes to work as a film critic for The Village Voice. One day, he spells actress Carol Channing’s name wrong (with one “n” instead of two). The paper writes a correction.

Abe (played by Tony Shalhoub of also-neurotic “Monk” fame) is consumed with remorse. He submits a 1,500word apology to his editor for publication (his editor rejects it). He tries to personally call the Voice’s subscribers to apologize to each and every one. It’s absurdly over the top, yet I suspect it would resonate with just about any serious journalist, from the tiniest weekly paper to the national heavyweights to the top-rated network or cable news shows.

Put a pin in “just about any serious journalist” for the moment.

Abe’s anguish certainly resonated with me as I alternated between laughing and cringing.

A painful search of the Times Union’s archives reveals that in my 35-plus years here, there are 57 stories with my byline and the words “Correction Published” on such-andsuch a date attached to them. Taking out duplicate entries and mistakes that were the result of someone else’s errors — mistakes inserted by an editor or written in a caption by a photographer, and inaccurate information from normally reliable sources — gets it down to 44 of the 4,227 stories, give or take, that I wrote over the years. I also found four more corrections attached to the roughly 4,500 unbylined editorials (again, give or take) that I wrote or edited after moving over to the opinion side of the paper in 2008.

It’s a rather small percentage (about one-half of 1 percent), and most of them were what I think people would consider about as consequential as spelling Carol Channing with only one “n.” But some mistakes, even the ones that I couldn’t readily locate in the archives but remember all too well, make me wince to this day. The time I had to correct a correction. The time I mixed up the Immaculate Conception with the Virgin Birth. The times — yes, plural — that I mixed up the first name of Albany Police Chief Kevin Tuffey with that of his brother, Albany Police Officers Union President Jim Tuffey.

So I feel for Abe.

I do not, though, feel for Tucker Carlson, whom no one should mistake for a serious journalist. Or for his former employer, Fox News, which recently settled a $1.6 billion defamation suit with Dominion Voting Systems for $787.5 million, and then sent Carlson packing a few days later.

For a journalist to say he was not rooting for the news organization in a libel suit may seem heinous. But evidence that had already come out in the case showed that Fox was even more of an embarrassment to the profession than it had been for so many years. After carrying water for Donald Trump, it hyped allegations