Regret the Error

Times (UK) apologizes for saying the Bishop of Southwark was drunk

We were wrong to say in our headlines (yesterday, front page and page 4) that the report of Judge Rupert Bursell QC into a complaint of drunkenness against Dr Tom Butler, the Bishop of Southwark, had concluded that Dr Butler was drunk.
Judge Bursell did not hear any evidence or reach any conclusions as to the truth of the complaint. We apologise to Dr Butler for the distress and embarrassment this must have caused him. Link

The Guardian has a story up about this. Geez, quite the week for UK newspaper apologies...

Moore on the Daily Mail error

We recently noted this rather serious correction/retraction from the UK's Daily Mail:

On May 20 and May 27, 2007, The Mail on Sunday published stories claiming that TV news presenter Jon Snow had an affair with a writer called Precious Williams, and that they smoked cannabis together. There is no truth in these allegations.
We accept that in fact Mr Snow never had any relationship with Miss Williams, and that the allegation of drug-taking was unfounded.
We are happy to set the record straight, and we apologise for the embarrassment caused.

Martin Moore of the Media Standards Trust initially raised questions about how and why the Mail went with the story in the first place, and he's followed up with an excellent post about why it's necessary for the paper to explain itself:

Why news organisations have to explain their mistakes if they want people to trust them.
On Tuesday evening I got a call from Precious Williams. Following my blog on Monday – when I appealed for more information about the Mail on Sunday's paltry two paragraph retraction – she called me from Berlin. She wanted people to hear her side of the story.
Rewind a second. On two consecutive Sundays, 20th and 27th May, the Mail on Sunday printed full page articles alleging that Jon Snow – the Channel 4 news presenter – had been involved in a 6 year affair with Precious Williams. Amongst many details, quotes and 'facts' it also alleged that the two of them regularly got stoned together. Then last Sunday, the 3 rd June, the newspaper retracted all claims in a 79 word statement, saying "There is no truth in these allegations… We accept that in fact Mr Snow never had any relationship with Miss Williams, and that the allegation of drug-taking was unfounded". No explanation as to why it had printed the articles in the first place.
Now if you're a regular reader what are you supposed to think? Perhaps Williams invented the whole thing and the newspaper was fooled. Perhaps the paper has something against Jon Snow? Perhaps it was a series of unfortunate journalistic errors?
...It's impossible to say what the real story is. Only two people know. But we can say that it isn't tenable for a news organisation to admit it got something so completely wrong but not explain how or why. If the Mail had a readers' editor he/she could describe what had gone wrong and what was being done to prevent it happening in the future. But it doesn't. Alternatively, the Mail could give both people the space in the paper to respond to the stories. But it hasn't.
In an age where there is so much media space, where you can give people chapter and verse on how you found a story and why people should trust it, such a lack of explanation is no longer acceptable and can only undermine readers' trust.

Well put.

UPDATED: Fox News issues on air apology for mixing up politicians when reporting on corruption indictment

Fox News issued an on air apology yesterday after it ran images of chairman of the House Judiciary Committee John Conyers of Michigan when reporting on the corruption indictment of Rep. William Jefferson of Louisanna. TalkingPointsMemo.com has the offending video here. The New York Sun has background here and here.
The apology read out on air was: "Yesterday at this time, news of the indictment of Congressman William Jefferson came down. We mistakenly ran the wrong video to accompany this story and we apologize for that error." 
The New York Sun reports that Fox anchor Martha MacCallum "told viewers at about 1:20 p.m. [yesterday]. The 10-second apology made no reference to Mr. Conyers and did not explain why or how the erroneous video made it to air."
Valid points. At the very least, it should have named Conyers as the offended party in order to clear his name. And an apology to him would have been appropriate. (The network did call his office to apologize.)

UPDATE: TVNewser reports that Fox has aired another apology. This one is more complete and better serves viewers and Conyers.  Good for Fox for coming back to this and making a proper correction:

On Monday in our report on the indictment of William Jefferson, in error we aired some video of Congressman John Conyers of Michigan.
That tape was labeled 'a meeting about William Jefferson' and it was mistaken as video portraying Mr. Jefferson. We regret this mistake. We in no way meant to suggest there was any connection between the Jefferson indictment and Congressman Conyers.
We have extended our apology privately to the congressman, and we do so here as well.

Daily Mail apologizes for printing salacious, false claims

On May 20 and May 27, 2007, The Mail on Sunday published stories claiming that TV news presenter Jon Snow had an affair with a writer called Precious Williams, and that they smoked cannabis together. There is no truth in these allegations.
We accept that in fact Mr Snow never had any relationship with Miss Williams, and that the allegation of drug-taking was unfounded.
We are happy to set the record straight, and we apologise for the embarrassment caused.

Martin Moore of the Media Standards Trust has more on this.

Syndicated columnist fails to get the joke

Howard Kurtz reports on how a columnist took a joke on Wonkette a little too seriously:

The quote was so explosive that Susan Estrich couldn't resist using it in her syndicated column.
The topic: "Is there anything Mitt Romney won't say or do to try to win the Republican nomination?"
Picking up on a zinger that John McCain had delivered to his presidential rival, Estrich, who managed Michael Dukakis's 1988 presidential campaign, found a retort online from the Romney camp. She wrote:
"Besides, who is McCain to talk? 'Why don't you go cry about torture some more, old man,' Romney's spokesman is quoted as saying in response. 'When we're in charge, we're going to nonlethally stress the hell out of you in Gitmo #15.'" 'Old man'? " she wrote. "Ouch. Accusing a man who spent years in a North Vietnam prison of 'cry[ing]about torture' and threatening to 'stress the hell' out of him?"
When the column was sent out, an editor at Michigan's Lansing State Journal, Derek Melot, thought the quote was so outrageous that he wondered why he hadn't heard it before. After an online search, he found that it had come from the satirical Web site Wonkette -- and was completely invented. Creators Syndicate, which handles Estrich's column, quickly sent out a "mandatory correction," and the gaffe apparently never got into print.
Estrich, who teaches law at the University of Southern California, says she thought of attributing the quote to Wonkette but figured many readers would be unfamiliar with the site. She says she used the formulation "is quoted as saying" because "I worry about this all the time when I rely on secondary sources. . . .
"I guess I shouldn't consider Wonkette to be 'reporting,' but that's the problem in our brave new world. Where I come from, there's a problem with making up quotes and attributing them to campaign spokesmen, but I guess that's very old-fashioned of me."
Double-checking material from humor sites is also an old-fashioned virtue...

Not a terrorist

In two articles published last year ("Cyanide fear triggered terror raid" and "Bomb suspect 'shot without warning'", June 4) we stated that government officials had said Abul Koyair, the brother of Abdul Kahar (who was shot by police when they raided the family home on June 2) had a number of criminal convictions and that their parents had gone on a planned holiday despite what had happened to their sons. We now understand, and accept, that that information was not true, that the decision to raid the family's home was based on false intelligence and that the family have never been involved in terrorism. We apologise for any embarrassment caused. Link

Brazil paper labels actors as drug dealers

Colin Brayton has a translation of a column by the ombudsman of a Brazilian newspaper that details how a publication mistook a photo of a bunch of actors for drug traffickers. His full post is here. Some highlights of his translation:

On Tuesday (May 22), the Jornal do Brasil published a jumphed on its front page with the headline “Drug traffic shows its firepower on Orkut.”
Above it was a photo of young persons, carrying weapons, with the caption “12 drug traffickers with firearms and bulletproof vests. Among them, one woman.”
The report on page A12 added more information obtained from the social-networking site Orkut: “Another profile, of an unidentified person, shows the photo, which demonstrates the shameless audacity of the traffickers on Orkut. Twelve young people armed with rifles, machine guns and pistols show off for the camera on the hilltop. There is even a woman in the group.”
It was a [brain-fart], which the Folha editorial manual defines as “publication of a serious factual error.”
The “traffickers” were actually actors shot while filming a feature-length film that has yet to be released.
Unfortunate errors like this are part of the history of every news organization and every journalist in Brazil. Let he who has never pulled this sort of thing cast the first stone...

Sounds like plagiarism to us...

Some portions of an article about Hollywood romantic comedies (Boy meets girl: it always ends in tears, Screen, May 10) should have been attributed to Joe Neumaier in a New York Daily News article on the same subject from January 28, 2007.
We regret the error Link

And Joe Neumaier agrees this is plagiarism. He contacted the Times to object to the theft of his work, and he also forwarded one of his letters to Romenesko. The Times' response appears to be entirely inadequate in this matter.  It needs to formally name the reporter responsible (Ian Johns) and investigate their previous work for other examples of plagiarism. And it should offer a proper apology to Neumaier. His letter:

To Whom It May Concern:

I'm the Sunday Features Editor with the New York Daily News, and read this story link via MovieCityNews.com. However, I believe a piece from Ian Johns in the Times of London (online edition), May 10, 2007, is, in part, a plagiarizing of a story I wrote in the Daily News published Jan. 28, 2007 (see attachment), in which my lede was: "If the current state of romantic comedy films could be summed up by a self-help book, here's a suggested title: 'We're Just Not That Into You Anymore.' "

Writer Ian Johns' lede: "If the current state of romantic comedy films could be summed up by a self-help book, a suggested title might be: We're Just Not Connecting Any More."

Later, I wrote, "...audiences and romantic comedies are going through a bad patch, and it'll take more than a pint of Haagen-Dazs and a crying jag to forget ...”Must Love Dogs” (John Cusack is neutered by Diane Lane)…"

Mr. Johns: "It'll take more than a pint of Haagen-Dazs to forget the joylessness of Must Love Dogs (John Cusack neuters Diane Lane) and Failure to Launch (Sarah Jessica Parker nudges slacker Matthew McConaughey from his parents’ home)."

There are other similarities in tone and word usage. Simply lifting a quote from the industry analyst I used in my piece and attributing that as "...told the Daily News…" is insufficient. (Per Mr. Johns' piece: 'According to Robert Bucksbaum, of the US box-office tracking firm Exhibitor Relations, romantic comedies have gone off-track. As he told the New York Daily News recently: "The genre’s hokey now, which is why a film like The 40-Year-Old Virgin felt new. It was a movie made for men that women also wanted to see. That may be the way of the future: unless these films have got another attraction, they’re going to be a tough sell.')

I expect an explanation, and expected more from the Times of London.

Joe Neumaier
Sunday Features Editor/Feature Film Writer
New York Daily News

Thanks for the tip, Jessica!

Prank quote makes its way into the UK press

We claimed in two articles in The smoking issue of G2 on May 14 that the health secretary, Patricia Hewitt, had said it had been "deplorable" that Faye Turney, one of the navy hostages held in Iran, had been shown on television smoking a cigarette because "This sends out completely the wrong message to our young people." In fact the quote was a fabrication published in the Sunday Telegraph on April Fools' day. That paper subsequently apologised for the unintended publication of the statement in other papers as being genuine, as did the Times, and so do we (Is the ban a good idea? No, page 6, G2, and Filthy habit, page 28, G2). Link

This is the original Sunday Telegraph story with the prank quote and it has still not been corrected online, though the writer did publish an apology in his subsequent column.

Ottawa Citizen photo error mistakes innocent man for convicted pedophile

Big, bad error in the Ottawa Citizen this week.
Yesterday it ran a major story on the front of its City section stating that a man had been convicted for a fourth time of sexually assaulting a minor. At the center of the above-fold story was a picture of the accused. Well, a picture the paper thought was of the accused. In reality, it showed a completely innocent man who has the misfortune of bearing a name similar to that of the convicted pedophile. The paper today ran a large apology on the front of its City section to try and clear the man's name. An embarrassing error for the paper, a tragic mistake for the innocent man.
The paper did the right thing by placing the apology in a location that is commensurate with the original story, though a strong argument can be made for putting it on the front page. The paper should also consider running it for more than one day, just to ensure readers don't miss it. And one thing missing from the apology is an explanation of how the error occurred.
Images of the original story and two of the resulting apology are below (click for larger). We also have two other recent Citizen corrections/apologies of note underneath them.

We also located this recent Citizen Clarification and Apology from May 12:

The headline on an article published March 14 might have given some readers the mistaken impression that Abdullah Almalki was implicated in a U.S. court case in which Mohamad Elzahabi is on trial for allegedly making a false statement to FBI agents during a terrorism investigation. Mr. Elzahabi is not on trial for any terrorism-related offence. Mr. Almalki has been asked to give evidence relevant to the allegedly false statement. The Citizen article was never intended to suggest that Mr. Almalki is a terrorist or is linked to any terrorism trials. The Citizen regrets any confusion caused by the headline, and apologizes to Mr. Almalki for any distress the Citizen may have caused him.

UPDATE: A reader just reminded us of a similar Citizen photo error from January when the paper mistakenly identified a murder victim's son as the accused. Time to reexamine those photo policies, perhaps?