Regret the Error

We Crunked: Regret corrections

Crunk time once again. Thanks to JF, Thomas, Bill, Bruce and Chuck for their free copy editing.

The Crunks:

• The headline on our March 24 post, "All Supreme Court Justices look alike," incorrectly used "looks" instead of "look." It has been corrected. We regret the error.
• In our March 24 post, "Sources with tall tales to tell, and why the press can't resist them," the sentence, "Every story is supposed to be humanized, to speak to..." initially left out the word "be." It has been corrected. We regret the error.
• Our sidebar, "Where Is Your Online Corrections Page," (left hand side of the site) initially spelled "Fox News" as "FOX News." It has been corrected. We regret the error.
• Our March 29 post, "Those elusive broadcast corrections," contained a few errors. The sentence, "Or one of the media watchdogs finds some fresh meat" incorrectly used "find" instead of "finds." The sentence, "But do broadcast media makes less errors than print?" initially used "does" instead of "do." And the sentence, "So while both print and broadcast make errors, news networks will usually just fix their reports for the next time..." initially used "report" instead of "reports." They have been corrected. We regret the errors.

Fuzzy numbers #4,616

Save The Children has spent $1.6 million building homes for tsunami victims in Aceh, Indonesia, not $16 million as reported yesterday.

All senators look alike

A photograph that illustrated a story in the Financial Post of March 25 on a bill in the U.S. Senate on trade with China showed Senator Lindsey Graham of North Carolina. It was incorrectly identified as being of Senator Charles Schumer of New York, also mentioned in the story. Link

UPDATE: As several readers have pointed out, Senator Lindsey Graham is from South Carolina. No correction to the correction as of yet.

Naming names

Power in Los Angeles: An article in Sunday's Section A about the Chandler family identified the director of the Center for the Study of Los Angeles at Loyola Marymount University as Franklin Guerra. His name is Fernando Guerra. Also, the name of the New York Times' Sulzberger family was misspelled as Sulzburger. A caption with the article, under a photo of men looking over plans for Mulholland Drive, misspelled the name of engineer DeWitt L. Reaburn as Raeburn. The caption also indicated that the photo was taken in 1932 by Sue Reeves. It was taken in the early 1920s by an unknown photographer. Link

A bad trip for Mark Richardson

A REPORT in The Daily Telegraph on February 24, 2006 entitled "A bad trip for Nimbin" included a photograph of a Nimbin street. Some readers may have identified Mr Mark Richardson from the photograph and inferred that Mr Richardson was involved in drugs. Readers should note this inference is not correct.

Seventh time lucky

Derik Edmunds, 16, of Homewood, and David Dixon, 17, of Brookline, were killed Oct. 9 when they car in which they were passengers crashed on Bigelow Boulevard, leading to homicide charges against the two women drivers. In six articles published since the incident Derik's first name, age and neighborhood of residency were incorrectly reported. Link

No asylum for the Guardian

The headline on a column, page 5, G2, March 24, referred to "illegal asylum seekers" and the text itself referred to "illegal refugees" as opposed to "real asylum seekers". The use of these terms is contrary to the guidelines of the Press Complaints Commission and the Guardian's own policy which recognises that in law there is no such thing as an illegal asylum seeker (see the readers' editor's column: Seeking asylum without prejudice, April 24, 2004). Link

The immigrant question

These corrections were all published yesterday:

A front-page article Thursday about the state's reliance on illegal immigrants should have said that a bill being debated in the state Legislature would require law enforcement officials to check the immigration status of any foreign national they arrest on felony charges or DUI. The article said the legislation would apply to any illegal immigrants arrested.

An article in Monday's Metro section about activist D.A. King should have said that The Dustin Inman Society is an anti-illegal immigration group. The organization is not opposed to legal immigration.

A front-page article Monday about immigration reform legislation incorrectly reported that a bill introduced by Sen. Saxby Chambliss would allow illegal immigrants to eventually gain permanent legal status. His bill provides only temporary legal status for illegal immigrants.

How CBS News handles errors and corrections

Yesterday we published an article about the lack of a universal error correction standard in broadcast media. In the piece, we made note of CBS' PublicEye blog and its mission to bring more transparency to the news operation. We sent along a few correction/error-related questions to the PublicEye folks and they promptly responded with information from CBS News insiders. Some excerpts are below. You can read the entire post here. We have to give the PublicEye folks their due for getting back to us so quickly with some interesting information.

On handling errors in a broadcast:

Linda Mason, Senior Vice President for Standards and Special Projects at CBS News told me how the network deals with those mistakes depends largely on how substantive the error – and that is a judgment call. Mason said if an error is serious enough it is corrected on the air, as the “Evening News” recently did when it displayed the wrong picture of one of the prisoners who escaped from Gitmo. But if it is a minor factual error or “something that clarifies or puts an issue in a better context,” a note would be made on the Web site where there is more space. Mason also said that all scripts are fact-checked before airing, but noted that does not guarantee mistakes are always avoided.

Online errors:

The Web site is a place where errors made both on air and on the site can easily be corrected.  Mike Sims, director of News and Operations for CBSNews.com, says any potential error will be looked at and will receive either a “clarification” or a “correction” depending on what is warranted. Where the clarification or correction is carried, and how long it remains on the site, depends on the importance of the issue. “The visibility it gets depends on how serious it is,” said Sims, who also noted that unless an error is caught immediately, changes are always to be noted.

On creating a static corrections page on the CBS News website:

...I asked Sims and Mason about the possibility of having a “corrections page” on the Web site and both said that is something there has been plenty of discussion about. Sims said everyone is considering the issue and “trying to find the best way” to institute corrections on the site. Stay tuned, we’ll let you know if and when that discussion comes to any kind of implementation.

We look forward to it.

All Israeli prime ministers look alike

A photo on this story of Shimon Peres, former prime minister of Israel, was mistakenly labeled as acting prime minister Ehud Olmert. Link