That's an epic fail.
Just because you never run corrections doesn’t mean you’re never wrong.
I was talking to Craig Flournoy, one of my journalism professors, one day last April when he said something to that effect. The Daily Campus had just run a correction recently, and he was telling me that we, the paper, were doing the right thing by publishing corrections.
And you know what? He’s absolutely right.
By their very nature, humans make a lot of mistakes. We’ve got the sheepish apology and “I’m only human” line down. You’d think journalistic institutions would realize this and admit their erroneous ways. Some do. Others don’t.
In an old post (but worth the read), Scott Rosenberg of MediaBugs.org highlights one of the reasons why corrections are important, focusing on two New York Times corrections of Voxox (originally reported as “Vovox”) and the College of William & Mary (originally printed as “William and Mary College”):
the importance of correcting them lies not in some earth-shattering import to the facts themselves but rather in the bond of trust that is established when a publication is seen to care enough to correct them — and, inversely, the loss of trust that occurs when the publication doesn’t bother.
Remember that, for Joe at Voxox or Sue at William & Mary, the misspelled name isn’t just a tiny fact in a sea of information; it represents that person’s point of maximum contact with the publication. Each time these people think of that newspaper or magazine they’re going to remember, These are the folks who couldn’t even get my name right. Multiply that by all the careless errors that get made in the course of normal journalism and you can get some insight into why public trust in the media has been on a downhill curve for so many years.
Issuing a correction is painful and gives me a queasy stomach. I absolutely hate doing it. Because as a journalist, I’m supposed to get the facts straight. The paper is supposed to get the facts straight. We’re the first draft of history!
Running a correction is something of a Catch-22: Either we admit that we were wrong or we don’t. Admitting mistakes shows our readers that we make mistakes and aren’t fully accurate. Not admitting mistakes shows that a) we’re too stupid to know we made a mistake, b) we don’t care about making mistakes, or c) we don’t want to make ourselves look bad. The only way out of these situations is to admit wrongdoing. To do so otherwise is a disservice to journalism.
The 2009 State of the Media report by the Pew Project for Excellence in Journalism shows that fewer and fewer Americans trust the media because we’re less accurate. We can’t just pretend the mistake never happened. Why not? Because our readers know if we get something wrong. There’s always going to be at least one guy who reads a story and notices that something’s wrong. And that one guy will inevitably tell someone else about the error. It spreads like a virus. They know we got something wrong, so why should they trust us?
Then there’s the other side of errors: spreading misinformation. Just ask Mark Twain, who is probably one of the most quoted people who ever lived. Or Marie Antoinette, who never did actually say, “Let them eat cake.” If we don’t correct our wrongs, some people might not realize we were wrong. This, I believe, is the single most important reason why we should correct mistakes. Not everyone is a fact-checker. It’s why birthers believe that Obama is not an American citizen (that, and a healthy dose of conspiracy theory). News outlets are supposed to be credible (because we’re all about facts), which means a lot of people take our information and assume its true. Even sometimes when it’s not.
If we don’t correct the information when we know it’s wrong, we’re lying to our readers. We’re intentionally saying the facts don’t matter. And in journalism, that’s akin to blasphemy.
