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Reign of ErrorThe average newspaper corrects very few of its factual errors, says professor.

By Jack ShaferPosted Wednesday, Aug. 15, 2007, at 6:08 PM ET

The average newspaper should expand by a factor of 50 the amount of space given to corrections if Scott R. Maier's research is any guide.

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Maier, an associate professor at the University of Oregon's School of Journalism and Communication, describes in a forthcoming research paper his findings that fewer than 2 percent of factually flawed articles are corrected at dailies.

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In 2003, Jack Shafer asked if American newspapers have an unhealthy number of errors. In April 2004, he praised 60 Minutes for renouncing a misleading story about Saddam defectors. Two weeks later, Shafer pointed out the elephant in the New York Times' newsroom—Judith Miller's errant reporting on Iraq. Finally, he proposed a method for correcting botched stories.

Maier's study relied on data gathered from 10 metropolitan newspapers: the Boulder Daily Camera, the Charlotte Observer, the Detroit Free Press, the Grand Forks Herald, the Lexington Herald-Leader, the Miami Herald (Broward Edition), the Philadelphia Inquirer, the San Jose Mercury News, the Tallahassee Democrat, and the Wichita Eagle. Starting on an arbitrary date, researchers clipped from each newspaper every locally produced and bylined story from Page One and the metro, business, and the lifestyle sections until they had collected 400. The study culled no sports stories, opinion pieces, columns, or reviews. (For reasons I won't go into here, only 200 news stories were gathered from the Free Press and 200 from the Inquirer, making for a total of 3,600 articles.)

The researchers then contacted a primary news source named in each of the stories and asked him to complete a survey about the accuracy of the piece. A news source was defined as a witness or participant with firsthand knowledge of the events described in the story. Only "hard," objective errors alleged by the news sources were included, and the study assumed that the factual assessments of the news sources were correct.

The results might shock even the most jaded of newspaper readers. About 69 percent of the 3,600 news sources completed the survey, and they spotted 2,615 factual errors in 1,220 stories. That means that about half of the stories for which a survey was completed contained one or more errors. Just 23 of the flawed stories—less than 2 percent—generated newspaper corrections. No paper corrected more than 4.2 percent of its flawed articles.

Obviously, a newspaper can't publish a correction until it learns of its error. But the studied dailies performed poorly when informed of their goofs. Maier found that 130 of the news sources reported having asked for corrections, but their complaints elicited only four corrections.

Most of the errors detected were relatively minor—an incorrect title or a wrong age. But this is small consolation given the preponderance of errors documented by Maier and the alleged failure of some newspapers to run a correction, even after being asked.

I hope somebody forwards Maier's research to New York Times Public Editor Clark Hoyt, if only to calm him down. In a Sunday column about chronic misspellings in the Times, Hoyt bemoans the incredible number of names the newspaper misspells, calling them a "cancer" that "appears to be getting worse." Hoyt writes:

… The New York Times misspells names at a ferocious rate—famous names, obscure names, names of the dead in their obituaries, names of the living in their wedding announcements, household names from Hollywood, names of Cabinet officers, sports figures, the shoe bomber, the film critic for The Daily News in New York and, astonishingly and repeatedly, Sulzberger, the name of the family that owns The New York Times.

Given Maier's findings, it's more likely that the number of misspelled names the Times corrects—which Hoyt claims hit 269 for the year as of early August—reflects rigor rather than negligence at the paper.

Consider: The Times published an average of one correction a day in 1982, Maier reports in his paper, while in 2004 it averaged nine a day. So, is the Times more error-prone today, as Hoyt seems to believe with his talk about a worsening cancer, or does its aggressive solicitation of corrections via e-mail and a toll-free phone number merely boost the number of errors reported? Guess where I stand.

Hoyt also writes of the outrage the Detroit Free Press editor who hired him in 1968 would have expressed at the Times' many spelling errors. Hoyt's implication is that the Free Press, long owned by the Knight Ridder chain where Hoyt spent most of his career, enforces—or once enforced—higher standards than the Times. Is that the case? Oh, hell no. At least eight of the newspapers shamed in Maier's study belonged to Knight Ridder at the time of the survey. So much for his former employer's devotion to accuracy.

I'm fine with Hoyt charging out of his pen to challenge the spelling skills of Times reporters and editors, but before he does so again, will he please consult Maier and other scholars who study press accuracy? He might find that the paper deserves more praise than criticism for its voluminous corrections.

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No discussion of Times errors is complete without a mention of Kill Duck Before Serving: Red Faces at The New York Times: A Collection of the Newspaper's Most Interesting, Embarrassing and Off-Beat Corrections. Buy this book now. Hitsville.org, my friend Bill Wyman's new blog, dices Hoyt's column into fine pieces. Maier presented his paper under the title "Tip of the Iceberg: Published Corrections Represent Two Percent of Factual Errors in Newspapers" earlier this month at the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication conference. He anticipates publication inside of a year. Every column about errors and corrections includes at least one big goof. Where's mine? Send findings to . (E-mail may be quoted by name in "The Fray," Slate's readers' forum, in a future article, or elsewhere unless the writer stipulates otherwise. Permanent disclosure: Slate is owned by the Washington Post Co.)

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Illustration by Mark Alan Stamaty.

COMMENTS

Remarks from the Fray:

Call me a cynic, but I don't think the purpose of publishing corrections is to inform the public of specific things wrong in a piece of newspaper coverage. Rather, it is to publish just enough that there is the illusion of post reporting fact checking. That way as readers go over their paper they see a scattering of corrections, which eases their mind over the factual accounts in the rest of the day's news. To best accomplish this, the corrections should be (and are) generally minor technical corrections to major bur rather boring stories (E.g., "In last Friday's paper we incorrectly reported that the growth in M2 in the third quarter of 2006 was 1.5 percent. The actual growth was 1.8 percent.")

--BlueEyes_Austin

(To reply, click here.)

Mayhaps the problem lies in specialization. In my days at college, journalism majors (or their even weaker counterparts, communications majors) weren't exactly the broadest intellectuals around. They were okay at learning their crafts, I suppose-- forming graphs, prioritizing info, remembering four of the five W's. But because they never seemed to show much interest in things like political science, history, hard sciences, economics or the other things they would ultimately end up writing about, they never got the fifth W-- the "why."

Sure, those with street smarts can be good at the regular crap that fills the papers-- who shot whom, who was arrested, who ended up in the morgue and under what circumstances. They can write authoritatively on missing pets, troublesome neighbors and the occasional serial rapist. But get into anything remotely smacking of public policy, and they are clueless.

Clueless and often lazy. They learn to rely on sources with agendas who spoon feed them biased half truths, untruths and anti-truths, which they either don't know or don't really care are accurate.

Thank god for blogs. At least there you have people who have the underlying background and knowledge to know what they are talking about. And eventually, they can figure out how to write effectively.

No wonder these MSM clowns are so snarky about them. Just the way the Legions were snarky about the Vandals.

--doodahman

(To reply, click here.)

Here we have a report that says newspapers make far more errors than most newspaper people ever thought possible. Jack Shafer uses that as a launching point to trash one of the few journalists that seem to be offended by errors. Seems like there might be more productive takeaways from this, Jack!

Early in my career I spent more than five years as a reporter, and I was very proud of those years. I have a very personal interest in this. Since leaving journalism, I've tried to pay special attention to news stories on events I have personal knowledge of. It's quite remarkable how often they are substantively incorrect -- almost always, in fact. So these findings are no surprise to me. I have gradually become inured to just how much journalists don't know about what they're covering. OK, it's a field where you're a generalist -- that's much of the fun, constantly learning something new. But totally missing the facts (and the point) seems not to trouble too many journalists, even those at "elite" publications -- and we're not even talking about broadcast and cable, where the traditional values of journalism appear utterly unknown.

All "professionals" -- I will use the term to describe today's journalists because I'm in a good mood -- tend to be resistant to being told they're doing a lousy job. Consider the number of doctors who have to be dragged kicking and screaming to wash their hands and write legible prescriptions! But some professionals are much further along than journalists in recognizing that they do indeed have a MAJOR problem. Journalists like to think that if everyone's yowling, they must be doing something right. There is, however, an alternate theory that explains the facts much more simply and elegantly. Look in the mirror!

--bcamarda

(To reply, click here.)

Some observations from someone who went to Journalism school back in the 1970's and then worked in the business. I don't know what is being taught in J-school these days but back then the emphasis was verify, verify, verify. Verify spelling, dates, quotes, etc. Both the dictionary and the AP Style Book was/is God. While I am grateful for the spell and grammar check functions of computer programs such as Word Perfect, they are no substitute for using a dictionary. Google and Wilkpedia cannot substitute for direct verification of hard facts such as proper name spelling, dates or place names. Fact finding involves hard work. Interviews require personal contact and e-mail or video phone calls usually don't cut it. Ever hear of eye contact and body language? Perhaps the problem today is that both editors and journalists are becoming too lazy. The news media is a business and has to be profit oriented but it need not be moronic.

--winstonsmiththe3rd

(To reply, click here.)

(8/19)

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