Getting The Meatball Recipe Right

Imagine being the newspaper journalist assigned to write these mea culpas for publication in the daily corrections column:

We regret the errors, indeed. As public editor of the Toronto Star, with responsibility for investigating, correcting and tracking the errors of Canada’s largest newspaper, I must admit I am glad I didn’t have to apologize for those particular mistakes. Not that I haven’t crafted a few cringe-worthy corrections myself. I won’t share them here, but you can certainly find the silliest and most embarrassing of the Star’s errors by logging on to RegretTheError.com, a popular media website founded in 2004 by Montreal freelance journalist Craig Silverman.

Silverman launched his website after reading a now historic “clarification” on the front page of Kentucky’s Lexington Herald-Leader on July 4, 2004: “It has come to the editor’s attention that the Herald-Leader neglected to cover the civil rights movement. We regret the omission.” Those remarkable words, written 40 years after the publication of the U.S. Civil Rights Act, as part of the newspaper’s retrospective on civil rights in America, sparked Silverman’s fascination with media mistakes and corrections, their history and the general issue of media accuracy.

Silverman’s website is now a daily must-look for tens of thousands of visitors, including numerous journalists who anxiously check in to see if their published corrections have been picked up by RegretTheError—(tagline: “Mistakes Happen”). And Silverman himself has evolved from a curious journalist with an interest in newspaper corrections to a passionate proselytizer on media accuracy and errors, as evidenced in this book spawned by his website.

This is a somewhat schizoid work that manages effectively to blend the didactic gravitas of a media ethics class with the sort of satiric humour so popular in late-night fake news.

On one hand, it is an exhaustive, thoughtful analysis of more than 70 years of academic and industry research into media accuracy, which probes the reasons why media errors occur, their impact on the credibility of journalism and what might be done to both minimize media mistakes and learn from them. On the other hand, it is a book of wry humour created by the inclusion of more than 300 of what the book jacket describes as “the funniest and most shocking media corrections of our time,” including this, from the New York Times: “Because of an editing error, a recipe last Wednesday for meatballs with an article about foods to serve during the Super Bowl misstated the amount of chipotle chilies in adobo to be used. It is one or two canned chilies, not one or two cans.”

The fallibility of journalism is certainly not news. And, by now, most journalists implicitly understand what two decades of media credibility studies have told us—the public really does think that if journalists can’t spell your name correctly, or state the correct amount of chilies in the meatball recipe, we can’t be trusted to report and analyze the significant and important events of our times. As Silverman writes, “Accuracy, in the end, is not just one of the central tenets of the profession. It is the very substance of the product of journalism.”

Why do journalists err? Silverman contends that media mistakes result from “sloppy, hurried reporting; bad typing; careless editing; unwarranted assumptions; faulty memory; inefficient processes; inelegant technologies that create error traps; or occasionally, outright incompetence or malice.” Data from the Chicago Tribune’s rigorous error tracking program indicates that “at least one-half to two-thirds of all errors in the newspaper were preventable.”

I agree with Silverman’s statement that “there will never be a time of 100 percent accuracy in the media,” despite the best efforts of reporters and editors. Journalism, is after all, a human endeavour. Silverman himself says that readers and viewers recognize that journalists are not “infallible gods,” and will forgive us our banal slips—as long as we own up to our mistakes and pursue our penance in published corrections.

Silverman’s central thesis here is that uncorrected errors “pollute journalism” and ultimately threaten democracy by causing readers and viewers to stop trusting the media. “In journalism, nothing is possible without trust,” he writes. “If the press does not have the trust of the people it strives to inform, enlighten, and occasionally, inspire or enrage, it ceases to fulfill the lofty role it claims in a democratic society.”

This well-researched book cites numerous studies that indicate that the number of actual media mistakes is far higher than the rate of corrected errors. Silverman, 30, who has never worked full-time in a newsroom, does not really explore why this is so. Had he interviewed senior editors of some of the important newspapers whose errors he mocks, I expect he would learn much about newsroom culture and the traditional reluctance of individual journalists to admit to mistakes. In none of the six Canadian daily newspapers that I’ve worked for have journalists been eager to own up to their errors, and I have been told by Greg Brock, corrections editor of the New York Times, that this is so even at that august institution. I expect this too is a human proclivity, and one might indeed find much the same reluctance to admit to errors in, for example, the banking industry.

To counter this reluctance, Silverman suggests that media organizations must enact more effective “quality control” as have other “high-reliability industries,” such as airlines, to improve accuracy and accountability and ensure public trust of a free press. Indeed, as this corrections convert preaches, ensuring a culture of accuracy looms as one of the most important challenges facing journalism in today’s always-on, digital “culture of scrutiny” in which readers are ever quick to point out errors.

That is likely so, but, ultimately, public trust in journalism depends on much more than simply getting the meatball recipe right. Although Silverman touches briefly on some of the more serious ethical lapses of mainstream media in recent years, including the shameful reporting (or rather, lack of it) on weapons of mass destruction in Iraq in the lead-up to the war in 2003, his focus on sweating the small stuff largely overlooks the significant tenets of ethical journalism—fairness, balance, verification, independence.

Indeed, in this new media universe in which readership, revenue and public trust in media are falling, it matters much if the newspaper spells your name correctly. But make no mistake about it: playing fair is a far greater, and more challenging, imperative of the responsible journalist.