Regret the Error

We Crunked: Regret corrections

It's time for us to head to Crunk town once again. We thank Alexandra, Vincent and Beth for helping us look bad.

The Crunks:

• Our April 21 post, "Be very afraid: Murderous school buses roam the world," misspelled the word "buses" as "busses." It has been corrected. We regret the error.
• Our April 28 post, "Chicago Tribune labels wrong men as mobsters," incorrectly stated that both men who were wrongly identified as mobsters by The Chicago Tribune were suing the paper. This was partly because a story about the men ran with a headline stating both were suing. We should have read more closely. As of now, only Frank Calabrese is suing. It has been corrected. We regret the error.

How does one define "grill"?

In "Time for Bush to abandon superpower myth" (Open Forum, April 24), the author mischaracterized the actions of Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., regarding the nominations of Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and would-be U.N. Ambassador John Bolton. Feinstein praised Rice before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee as a guest (not a member), reserving her criticism for other members of the Bush administration. And although the senator is on record as opposing Bolton's nomination, she did not "grill" him before the committee.

The Sentinel pulls an Albom

Mitch Albom did it. A Boston Globe freelancer did it. Now the Orlando Sentinel has joined the party by going to print with details about an event that hadn't yet occurred, and then getting busted when things didn't happen as expected. Here's the correction:

An article on the front of Tuesday's Sports section reported incorrectly that a meeting occurred Monday night between Orlando Magic General Manager John Weisbrod and interim coach Chris Jent about the team's search for a new coach. In fact, the meeting did not occur until Tuesday morning. The reporter wrote the article after being told by Jent that the meeting would occur Monday evening but failed to check back to determine that the meeting had happened. In fact, the meeting had been postponed because of a scheduling conflict.

Now let's be clear: reporters will regularly write stories so the information is current/relative for the day it is published. The problem happens when they don't insert words to hedge their bets when events have not yet occurred. In this case, the writer should have said that the meeting was expected to happen Monday night, just as Albom should have written about the plans of those two basketball fans, rather then opting for the more dramatic present tense. These seem like small mistakes, but when you are wrong -- and these three recent examples show that plans can change and reporters will often be wrong -- it turns the story into all-out fiction.

Gentlemen "pee" in the pool, they don't "piss"

Truly, manners are a matter of perception:

An error in reading a shorthand note caused us to quote Phil Sawford, who is defending Kettering for Labour, as accusing his ex-colleague Brian Sedgemore as "pissing in the pool" after he had defected to the Liberal Democrats (Sedgemore bolsters Lib Dems' Iraq attack, page 4, yesterday). What Mr Sawford told our reporter was that Mr Sedgemore had "peed" in the pool. He does not use the word piss nor does he like it. Apologies.

UPDATED: Chicago Tribune labels wrong men as mobsters

Sharing a name with a convicted mobster can be dangerous. Just ask Frank Calabrese, a Chicago businessman and horse owner. UPDATE: Or Stanley Swieton, also from Chicago. Calabrese opened up Tuesday's Chicago Tribune, turned to page 18, and found his picture in a graphic titled "Infrastructure of a Chicago mob." The paper inadvertently used his image instead of one for Frank Calabrese Sr. who is currently in prison. The next day the Trib used a picture of Stanley Swieton and identified him as Joseph "The Clown" Lombardo, another mobster. To make matters worse, the pic ran on the front page under a headline asking, "Have you seen this `Clown?" The paper ran a correction in yesterday's paper and also published a front page story to clarify the Calabrese mistake. It gave Swieton the same correction and a story treatment today. Looks like it wasn't enough, as both men Calabrese is now suing the paper. CORRECTION: Though the headline on this article implies they are both suing, only one has gone legal as of yet. Can't say we blame him.

The errors are, of course, terrible. But the Trib did the right thing by running corrections and combining them with front page Metro section articles to make sure readers were aware of the mistake. (We'll make one small suggestion that they should have bumped both stories to the front page, but there are many papers that would have just buried the corrections so at least the paper adhered to a higher standard.) Here's the corrections, and excerpts of the follow-up articles are below:

A graphic explaining the alleged infrastructure of the Chicago Outfit mob on Page 18 of Tuesday's main news section incorrectly used a picture of businessman Frank Calabrese instead of mobster Frank Calabrese Sr. A story explaining the mistake appears on Page 1 of today's Metro section.

A picture caption on Page 1 Wednesday incorrectly identified a man on a bicycle as the reputed mob boss Joey "the Clown" Lombardo. In fact, the man's name is Stanley Swieton and he has no ties to organized crime. A story explaining the mistake is on Page 1 of today's Metro section.

The articles:

At first, Frank Calabrese thought Tuesday's front-page Tribune story was simply another article about the mobster who shares his name.
Then he turned to page 18.
There, in black-and-white, was his own picture in a graphic titled "Infrastructure of a Chicago mob."
Calabrese, a longtime Chicago businessman and horse owner who has no mob ties, could barely believe his eyes.
"I opened it up and I said, `God, what am I doing in the paper?'" Calabrese, 76, said Tuesday. "It's aggravating. People assume things."
Tribune editors said they had intended to run a head shot of Frank Calabrese Sr., 68, a convicted mobster who is in prison on a 1997 conviction for using violence to collect several million dollars in "juice" loans...
The Tribune had in its archives a 1988 photo of Calabrese the businessman accepting an "Excellence in Manufacturing" award from Price Waterhouse. The newspaper erroneously used that photograph in its graphic describing Tuesday's mob indictments.
Frank Calabrese, the retired businessman, said he has run into problems because of his name in the past. After previous news stories have appeared about the mobster, the businessman has also received calls.
Frank Calabrese said he has never met the mobster who shares his name...

The photo that ran on the front page of Wednesday's Chicago Tribune was, in fact, of a dapper old man.
But he wasn't Joseph "The Clown" Lombardo.
He was Stanley Swieton, 69, a soft-spoken Chicagoan who never figured he'd make the front page of the newspaper.
The photo, under a headline asking, "Have you seen this `Clown?'" was described as a picture of Lombardo, the subject of an international manhunt after he was indicted in a broad mob conspiracy Monday.
"I couldn't believe it," Swieton said Wednesday, after seeing the picture--of himself--pedaling down Grand Avenue dressed in a hat and overcoat. "I don't want anything to do with the mob."
Chicago Tribune Editor Ann Marie Lipinski apologized for the error.
"We sincerely regret our mistake," she said. "We strive for accuracy, but when we make an error we try to correct it. We are very sorry for this mistake and apologize to Mr. Swieton."
The picture that ran Wednesday was purchased by the Tribune from a woman who said she photographed the man about a year ago as part of a class project at Columbia College.
The photographer, Val Carpenter, said she did not ask the man his name, but thought it was Lombardo after reading news accounts about his indictment Tuesday.

Paper engages in high school rumor mongering

The Kitchener-Waterloo Record in Ontario, Canada ran a recent expose about sex and high school. (Maybe they're interested in writing about this crazy "toothing" trend?) At the heart of the story -- not to mention in the lead -- was the re-telling of an incident when a "...Grade 9 girl was discovered giving oral sex to a Grade 12 boy in a washroom during a student dance." Excerpts of the article are below (emphasis ours). And under those excerpts is the text of a follow up story that exposed this salacious tale to be false. Looks like the paper took a locker room rumor and played it as fact. That's, like, shameful,

The original article (April 18, 2005):

Long, passionate kisses in the school cafeteria. Classroom aisles blocked by teens holding hands in class. Or how about a teen couple caught having oral sex in a washroom during a school dance?
High schools are places where the emotional intensity and growing sexuality of teenage relationships have to be balanced against a sense of what's proper in a place of learning.
...In every school, there are times and places where the physical becomes uncomfortably intense.
Baker, a student trustee on the Waterloo Region District School Board and a member of Cameron Heights' student council, said a Grade 9 girl was discovered giving oral sex to a Grade 12 boy in a washroom during a student dance a few months ago.
She was there when some of her co-councillors discovered the tryst and reported it to teachers.

The follow up (April 25, 2005; written by the same reporter):

High school gossip can spread faster than the most aggressive computer virus.
And no one knows this better than students, staff and teachers at Cameron Heights Collegiate Institute in Kitchener. (EDITOR'S NOTE: And your readers.)
It was a Friday night last fall, the first dance of the school year. There was plenty of supervision, both by teachers and senior students. One female teacher stationed in front of a men's washroom saw a girl follow a boy into the washroom.
According to Cameron Heights principal Kelly Kempel, the teacher who saw the girl immediately told the girl to get out.
Student Rachael Baker, who is on the student council, was helping to organize and supervise the dance. She wasn't right by the washroom and didn't see the teacher confront the girl, but she heard other teens gathering and talking about it.
By the end of that evening, the gossip had evolved into a story that a girl had been caught in the washroom performing oral sex on a male student.
It wasn't true, but "a lot of people were talking about it, at the dance and afterwards," Baker said.
"I and other students in the school were under the impression that it had happened."
It was talked about for a few days and then, as is the way of gossip, it faded as a topic of conversation.
Then, months later, a Record reporter called Baker, who is also one of two young trustees representing students' concerns at the Waterloo Region District School Board. The reporter (EDITOR'S NOTE: Don't you mean "this reporter"?) was working on an article about sexual behaviour in high schools, what was permitted and what was not, and asked what Baker thought.
Baker repeated the story about oral sex in the washroom, believing it was true.
When The Record included the incident in a story on this page last Monday, principal Kelly Kempel was quick to point out that it hadn't happened.
Not only did the story hurt student and staff pride in the school, but it was also hurtful to the individuals being talked about, Kempel said.
She said the teacher had intervened before anything could happen in the washroom.
Moreover, there was no record of disciplinary action being taken, which would have followed if the students were caught in sexual activity.
"It's important for us to learn that anyone and everyone can be hurt by gossip," Kempel said. "Those who are sharing in it may be inadvertently causing hurt."
Now, after hours of talking with Kempel, Baker believes the story was inaccurate. "I had my facts wrong," she said.

If only the paper would follow this high school student's example and simply admit it had its facts wrong.

This report (and correction) not ready for the majors

An article in the Sports section Saturday about the American Hockey League playoffs misstated the names of two players. Brian Finley, not Brian McKinley, is the Milwaukee Admirals' goaltender. Stanislav Chistov, not Stansislov Chistov, is a Cincinnati Mighty Ducks left wing. The article also incorrectly stated that Milwaukee had a three-man power-play advantage, which does not occur under AHL rules.

So was it a power-play after all? One-man advantage? Two-man advantage?

They did it all for the Cheetos

In a Page 1 story Sunday about overtime expenditures in Cook County, a word was incorrectly substituted in a quote from John Karebian, associate director of labor relations for the Illinois Nurses Association. The corrected sentence: "They're not doing it for the money, they're doing it because somebody has to pick up those shifts." The incorrect word was "chips" instead of "shifts."

Only you can help stop media-on-media errors

Because of a reporting error, a profile of New York Times public editor Daniel Okrent in Sunday's Globe magazine referred to him as staff member. The job at the Times is as an independent contractor. Also, Okrent's last column has been changed from May 29 to May 22.

Life for sale

An article in Monday's Section A on school attendance boundaries quoted Amy Hanacek, a mother from Capistrano Beach, as saying, "When you move into a community, you buy into a lifestyle." It should have read, "When you move into a community, you embrace a lifestyle."