Regret the Error

Sold out from under them

In the real estate transactions on Business Page D8 on Dec. 18, First American Real Estate incorrectly reported that a home at 900 Anna St. in Broderick sold for $320,000. The home did not change hands and should not have been listed. Link

UPDATED: Toronto Star and two other papers lift decade-old item, run it as new

When we came across this editorial (we've struck "editorial" because according to Antonia Zerbisias of the Star it is a) brief from the Star's weekend Life section (found via Fark) it made our day:

Moon God Drinking Products Co., a skin care company in China, has offered a bounty of 1,000 yuan ($144) for every typographical or literary error found in a day's editions of four Chinese publications in an attempt to embarrass journalists into better writing. Hao Mingjian, who came up with the idea for the bounty, said that "China's press has lost its polish in the past decade or two," which "reflects a chaotic cultural environment and shows people lack a sense of responsibility." We applaud Hao's initiative, but we have learned over our years at the Star that it is impossible to embarrass journalists. Public humiliation is our stock in trade...

We liked it so much that we tried to track down the original story. That led us to This is True, which recently had the item up on its website, though it wasn't on the home page anymore. We also saw that two other publications had used the item. The Wisconsin State Journal ran it and credited This is True. The Rocky Mountain News published it and credited Reuters. We searched in Factiva for the original Reuters story. Nothing showed up in the past year. We searched the Reuters site and also came up empty-handed.
So we emailed Randy Cassingham, the man behind the This is True empire. He told us that he had recently been ill and that caused him to pull together some of his favorite strange-but-true items from 10 years earlier for the December 5 edition of his weekly newsletter. (Producing an all-new version would have been too difficult.) Cassingham told his readers that all the items were old favorites. Included was this item from July 9, 1995:

Moon God Drinking Products Co., a skin care company in China, has offered a bounty of 1,000 yuan (US$120) for every typographical or literary error found in a day’s editions of four Chinese publications in an attempt to embarrass journalists into better writing. Hao Mingjian, who came up with the idea for the bounty, said that “China’s press has lost its polish in the past decade or two,” which “reflects a chaotic cultural environment and shows people lack a sense of responsibility.” (Reuters) ...Nice try, but journalists can’t be embarrassed.

So the Star and the News and the Journal all poached an item more than a decade old, failed to verify it, and reported it as new news. As Cassingham noted in an email to us after we directed him to the Star editorial story it appears that the Star even chose to crib and slightly alter Cassingham's line that "journalists can't be embarrassed." Not to mention the fact that the paper used his item pretty much verbatim.
"Note they even stole my tagline for the story -- my comment on the story that's my stock in trade as a news commentary columnist -- and published it as their own," he told us via email.  "That's the very definition of plagiarism, isn't it?"
The irony of this -- a very large media mistake in a story about media mistakes -- is rich. But Cassingham  has every right to be upset. All three papers failed their readers by not checking the wire to verify the story. But the Star's infractions are by far the worst. The paper lifted the item and failed to credit any source. Then it plagiarized.
"It's patently obvious where they got this story," said Cassingham. "That they didn't check their Reuters wires for corroboration is shocking -- it's no wonder that there is scandal after scandal of embarrassing plagiarism, made-up stories, and other malfeasance by newspapers these days."
Let's see what kind of correction or apology is offered by the newspapers. In the Star's case, it better be substantial. UPDATE: Go here to read about the Star's correction.
We've pasted more of Cassingham's poignant comments below. And we found the original Reuters report  (though it was "Reuter" back then). It hit the wire on June 26, 1995 and was picked up in the Baltimore Evening Sun, USA Today and the Chicago Sun-Times:

SHANGHAI, June 26 (Reuter) - A Chinese skin care product company is offering cash prizes to readers who spot typographical and literary errors in Monday's editions of three top Shanghai newspapers and a magazine.
Moon God Drinking Products Co will hand over 1,000 yuan ($120) for each mistake found in the Wen Hui daily, Liberation Daily, Xinmin Evening News and the magazine Pay Attention To Words, the newspapers reported on Monday.
As well as being a publicity stunt for the company, which makes a drink containing powdered pearls said to improve skin tone, the aim is to encourage journalists to brush up their prose.
"China's press has lost its polish in the past decade or two," said Hao Mingjian, deputy editor-in-chief of the Shanghai Culture and Art Publishing House, which came up with the idea for the competition. "It reflects a chaotic cultural environment and shows people lack a sense of responsibility."

Randy Cassingham's comments:

I'm a university-trained journalist and a member of the Society of Professional Journalists. This isn't how I learned journalism. I learned to give proper attribution. I learned to have a second source for items that are dubious. And, most importantly, I learned to have respect for the process of journalism.

Where is that respect and professionalism now? We can't just blame Jayson Blair. Plagiarism and made-up stories is just the most outrageous fact of life now. We have long had typos and grammar blunders that would make Strunk and White seethe -- so many that they're not even worthy of comment, even ridicule, anymore.

What will be the ultimate result? We're already seeing it: people are forgetting about newspapers and turning to TV and the Internet to get their news, because they just can't trust newspapers anymore. We have the L.A. Times putting a hoax story on its front page.  We have major city papers lifting items from a columnist, even though it's a cinch they'll get caught.

Newspapers scream and cry that people just don't care anymore. They don't get it: people DO care. They care that the news is correctly reported. They care that it's written well. They care that it's edited well. They care that proper attributions are made. And they're just not getting that from newspapers anymore, so they're moving to other media where they can get it (or, at least, think they can). And it's not fun to watch newspapers take yet another step into the depths right before my eyes.

Resurrection

A man who stepped in front of a big rig truck traveling along Highway 216 near Ivanhoe Dec. 15 in an apparent suicide attempt did not die. California Highway Patrol officials provided incorrect information for a Page B2 brief that ran Dec. 16. Link

NYT Mag doesn't know its own size

The Back Story note on the table of contents on Nov. 27, about the cover article that week on the tsunami in Southern Asia, referred incorrectly to the article's length. It was not the longest in the history of the magazine; several other articles were longer, the most recent being Sydney Schanberg's "Death and Life of Dith Pran" in 1980. (No link available)

Paper can't recognize former columnist

In some editions of yesterday's National Post, a photograph that was intended to show John Fraser, the minister of Fisheries and Oceans from 1984 to 1985, in fact was one of John Fraser, the Master of Massey College, the University of Toronto. The Post regrets the error. Link

What this correction doesn't mention is that Fraser (of Massey College) was a long-time columnist for the Post.

LA Times publishes lengthy correction to article with plagiarized material

The Los Angeles Times, which recently embarrassed itself by publishing a hoax quote in a page one story, has published a lengthy correction to fix incorrect information and note plagiarized material in a Dec 18 column. The column, by staff writer Cecilia Rasmussen, began with this sentence: " Some of his critics called him a man without a nation in search of a good fight." That sentence was lifted from an article by Samuel Truett, an assistant professor of history at the University of New Mexico. So was other language in the article. The correction is below. The Times, however, has not attached the correction to the story online. Nor has it altered the story to credit Mr. Truett and the other sources. The correction:

The L.A. Then & Now column in the Dec. 18 California section, which was about Emilio Kosterlitzky, a Russian imperial sailor who enlisted in Mexico's army and later spied for the U.S. while living in Los Angeles, did not credit some of the sources used. In addition to those cited — Times articles published during Kosterlitzky's lifetime and a 1970 biography by Cornelius C. Smith Jr. — sources included an article by Samuel Truett, assistant professor of history at the University of New Mexico, from the 2005 fall/winter issue of Huntington Frontiers magazine, a publication of the Huntington Library. The Times column said that during Kosterlitzky's last days at Ft. Rosecrans in San Diego, an FBI agent offered him a job in Los Angeles. Truett's article provided the specifics of that job offer, including the name of the federal agent who hired Kosterlitzky in 1914 to spy on refugees in the U.S. The column called him an FBI agent, but in 1914 the agency was known as the Bureau of Investigation. The column also said that when Kosterlitzky and his soldiers in Mexico surrendered to U.S. troops to seek American sanctuary from rebels, "according to international law, the neutral U.S. had to hold them as prisoners of war until they could be repatriated." That information should have been credited to Truett. The column said some called Kosterlitzky "a man without a nation in search of a good fight," language that also should have been credited to Truett. Other sources used in the column were Times articles published after Kosterlitzky's death, a dispatch from the El Paso Times and the 1935 book "Los Angeles, City of Dreams," by former Times columnist Harry Carr. In addition, the column reported that Kosterlitzky captured Geronimo but released him because he thought the Indian was an honorable adversary. Kosterlitzky told at least one other version of the Geronimo story; the truth is in doubt. Link

And he would have preferred it that way

Keith Reese Sr. is the father of a boy who threw a ball at an autistic teammate before a youth baseball game in June in Uniontown. A story Friday misidentified Mr. Reese as the father of the autistic boy. Link