Regret the Error

Nick Saban corrects tire slash

In a column on MSNBC.com, Alabama coach Nick Saban said an assistant's tires had been slashed. The assistant later said the air in her tires had been let out. Saban later admitted he "didn't intend to mislead anyone." Link

Paper kills daughter

The daughter of Lucyna Neville, one of the co-founders of the Hopewell Eating Disorders Support Centre of Ottawa, is still alive. The centre is dedicated to the memory of another young woman who died of an eating disorder, Genevieve Gagnon. Incorrect information appeared in a story on page J5 Saturday.

Rebuild Iraq, er, America

Aug. 30--A local group calling for an end to the Iraq war is urging focus on America's crumbling infrastructure, health care and schools, a spokeswoman said. Due to an editor's error, a story on Page B2 Wednesday erroneously reported that the group was urging those improvements in Iraq. Link

Fuzzy numbers etc.

A story Sunday about crime rates at Utah colleges contained erroneous calculations.
The Deseret Morning News misinterpreted computerized crime data tables from the U.S. Department of Education. The tables were titled for school years, such as 2004-05. But they contained data for entire calendar years, such as all of 2004 and all of 2005, not just the school year. That led to inflated calculations.
A chart with corrected information appears here, showing corrected average annual crime rates per 10,000 students for five calendar years between 2001 and 2005.
As reported, data generally show that smaller and rural schools tend to have higher crime rates than larger and urban schools. Experts said that is sometimes because students at smaller schools feel like they know everyone and feel safe, so they may not lock up goods or take other precautions they should.
Corrected data show that rural schools in Utah had an average crime rate of 14.3 crimes per 10,000 students annually, compared to 10.8 in urban areas.
Corrected data shows the average annual crime rate at schools with fewer than 2,000 students was 17.4 per 10,000. In comparison, it was 10.9 at schools with 2,000 to 14,000 students, and 11.1 at schools with more than 14,000 students.
Corrected crime rates at state and major private colleges ranged from a high of 27.8 crimes per 10,000 students at Snow College to a low of 1.7 at Utah Valley State College.

Vick ruins someone else's football career

A story, which appeared in the Tuesday, Aug. 28 edition of 24 hours Vancouver ("Leos' Marsh defends Vick"), contained a quotation about dogfighting which was taken out of context.
B.C. Lions player Dante Marsh said he does not condone dog-fighting.
24 hours apologizes to Dante Marsh and the Lions organization for any inconvenience this story may have caused. Link

Chicago Tribune publishes editorial to correct the great cholera legend

A reader (thanks D.F. Manno) has pointed us to a recent editorial in the Chicago Tribune wherein the paper corrects the erroneous tale of a cholera epidemic in 1885 that was said to have killed 90,000 Chicagoans.
The paper credits the debunking to Libby Hill,  an academic and author who recently wrote an article about the epidemic for the Tribune Magazine. The article is no longer on the Tribune's website. A very brief excerpt is here on the Museum of Hoaxes. More background here.
This belated correction comes at a time when Clark Hoyt, the public editor of The New York Times, has instigated a debate about what to do with errors lurking in newspaper archives. This particular error has been lurking in a variety of archives for a long time. It became, as Hill details, a powerful urban legend.
"The saga has been retold so many times, in books, journals and over the airwaves -- and, yes, in this newspaper -- that most Chicagoans attuned to local history know of its gruesome details," notes the Tribune editorial. "Fact is, the story of Chicago's killer cholera  epidemic is a fiction, a phony melodrama."
The editorial begins by quoting a 1995 Tribune article that retold the erroneous tale. Then it moves to share the fascinating correct material provided by Hill. It's an interesting read, and good that the paper includes itself among those fooled by the legend, even if it would be ideal to know exactly how many times the Tribune has cited the incorrect tale over the years. The number would help drive home just how entrenched the story had become.
There is also one aspect of the paper's editorial that rings a familiar note:

We could attribute the legend's long life and frequent repetition to a decidedly un-Chicago trait: gullibility. Ninety thousand deaths?
We'd rather, though, characterize this as a case of facts getting in the  way of a good story. Less embarrassing that way.

After the Chicago Daily Tribune made its famous "Dewey Defeats Truman" error in 1948, it too ran a corrective article with a bit of a playful tone. The paper laid much blame at the feet of pollsters and their "alleged science." It concluded:

Having been bitten as badly as the next one, we hope that we have the courage to swear off these sessions with the crystal ball in the future. Divination and inspection of the entrails ought to be left to the vanished priests of ancient Rome. The science is too fallible.

It seems that, even in the face of serious error, the Tribune of past and present can't help but inject a little levity and indulge in an effort to share the blame. (Not to get too pluggy about it, but the tale of the Dewey/Truman error is retold in detail in the upcoming Regret the Error book.)
From the editorial:

...Imagine that. A cholera outbreak killed 90,000 Chicagoans -- and also generated engineering lessons that helped build the Panama Canal. The saga has been retold so many times, in books, journals and over the airwaves -- and, yes, in this newspaper -- that most Chicagoans attuned to local history know of its gruesome details.
Imagine that, indeed. Fact is, the story of Chicago's killer cholera  epidemic is a fiction, a phony melodrama.
It was concocted a half-century ago to sell the public on a Chicago-area flood control scheme that evolved into what's now called the Deep Tunnel project.
Author Libby Hill, who teaches in the department of geography and environmental studies at Northeastern Illinois University, has tried valiantly to debunk the cholera epidemic, most recently in a July 29 Tribune Magazine article titled "The making of an urban legend."
Chicago did suffer a massive storm on Aug. 2, 1885, and polluted river water did flood into the lake. But a shift of winds pushed the contaminants away from the city's water intakes. Over the next two weeks, the anticipated fouling of drinking water didn't occur. One newspaper said winds and low temperatures had "combined to reduce sickness and the death rate far below the average of this season of the year. ... Chicago is very fortunate."
But the seeds of a bogus legend had been planted. According to Hill, a 1956 pamphlet published by what's now the Metropolitan Water Reclamation District recounted the 1885 deluge and added that, "Death from the terrible diseases of polluted water was one byproduct of the storm."
And in 1976, as part of a debate in the Tribune's pages over the then-nascent Deep Tunnel project, Sanitary District President Nicholas J. Melas argued that the project was needed: He recounted how the 1885 flooding "caused the deaths of 90,000 people." Three years later, Chicago Magazine reaffirmed that after the storm, cholera and typhoid "wiped out 90,000 people."
Outbreaks of killer diseases truly did play havoc with Chicago and its people: stockyards runoff, water-borne sewage, spoiled food and lethal bugs variously brought dysentery, smallpox, diphtheria, influenza and other contagions to the city.
Chicago did not, though, suffer deaths of Black Plague proportion in 1885. We're sure of that -- and we have Libby Hill to thank for setting us straight...

Mr. Goldsomething

GOLDMAN SACHS GROUP Inc. didn't come close to providing $1.2 billion in 2006 bonuses sought by Mark McGoldrick for a group he headed at the investment bank. In some early editions of the Aug. 18 issue, a page-one article incorrectly identified Mr. McGoldrick as Mr. Goldman in that sentence. Link

Apology

ON 20 and 21 February we published articles which wrongly alleged Caprice was in rehab in the Priory in London. We accept these allegations are untrue and we are happy to make clear that Caprice was not and has never been in rehab in the Priory or anywhere else.
We apologise to Caprice for the embarrassment caused. Link

No such thing as a "do not watch" list

"September Dawn": An Aug. 19 Calendar section article about the movie "September Dawn" quoted Tom Kimball, a book review editor for the Mormon History Assn., as saying the film has been put on a "do not watch" list by Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints officials. Kimball told The Times that Mormons who have seen the film have called it anti-Mormon and that this sent a strong message to Mormons not to see it. The church says it does not issue a "do not watch" list of movies. Link

Editorial admits its geographical error, calls attention to the issue

NO WONDER geography needs more emphasis, not less, in Arkansas schools.
We ourselves are an embarrassing case in point: We got our past and current African horrors mixed up in Monday's editorial. Robert Mugabe is the dictator who's presided over the ruination of Zimbabwe, formerly Rhodesia, rather than Rwanda, formerly the Belgian trusteeship of Ruanda-Urundi, the scene of a genocide that preceded the one in Darfur, a region of Sudan, formerly the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan.
The error was entirely our own and not that of our geography teacher in grade school or the old Book of Knowledge, the twin and wholly estimable sources of whatever geographical knowledge we still retain.The map of Africa has changed wildly since we had to draw it and memorize all the capitals back in class, which is no excuse for our mistake. Rather, our cartographic ignorance is one more strong argument for emphasizing geography, along with history, as a separate discipline in elementary school... Link (sub req'd)