Seth Rich was found dead near his home on July 10, 2016, with two bullet wounds in his chest. Two weeks later, Wikileaks released thousands of internal emails from the Democratic National Committee. Conspiracy theorists and Fox News claimed that Rich, a DNC staffer, was killed because he had provided the emails to Wikileaks.
One week later, Fox News retracted the story. “The article was not initially subjected to the high degree of editorial scrutiny we require for all our reporting,” Fox said in a statement. “Upon appropriate review, the article was found not to meet those standards and has since been removed.” Two months later, Rich’s parents sued Fox News.
In 2017, CNN had to retract a story that said Congress was investigating ties between a Russian investment fund and Trump campaign officials. Three journalists involved in reporting and editing the online story resigned.
Retractions and lawsuits over errors are rare, so these cases are extreme examples of the kinds of mistakes news outlets make. But errors of all sorts, from misspellings to wrong information, contribute to the overall lack of public trust in journalism.
Research by the Media Insight Project in 2016 found that “accuracy is the paramount principle of trust.” Fully 85 percent of respondents said it was extremely or very important to them that news organizations get the facts right. Yet errors persist and they’re not uncommon.
“If there’s misspelled words or grammatical errors and typos, then I mean, if they’re not taking the time to care about their writing, who’s to say they took the time to actually do a good job of reporting?”
–Nate (age 22)
According to a 2005 survey conducted by Scott Maier of the University of Oregon and Philip Meyer of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 61 percent of 4,800 stories collected from 14 newspapers contained either subjective or objective errors. The study identifies subjective error as information considered technically correct but misleading, and objective error as factual inaccuracy, like misspellings and incorrect ages or addresses. Of the stories surveyed, 46.6 percent contained subjective errors and 48.2 percent contained objective errors. Maier called the results “sobering.”
“More than 60% of local news and news feature stories in a cross-section of American daily newspapers were found in error by news sources, an inaccuracy rate among the highest reported in nearly seventy years of research, and empirical evidence corroborating the public’s impression that mistakes pervade the press.”
As Maier and Meyer’s study highlights, errors by journalists andnews organizations range from small factual inaccuracies to confusing wording to failure to cover critically important issues. And evidence suggests that in the 13 years since their research was published, not much has changed.
For example, The New York Times says it receives an estimated 14,000 reports of errors per year. It is one of the few news organizations known to have a full time position dedicated to corrections.
Errors aren’t always serious, of course. In 2017, Buzzfeed News reported that a man brought three llamas to protest the presidential inauguration in January. This was incorrect; he brought two llamas and one alpaca. A correction was added at the bottom of the original article.
One factor in the co
ntinuing prevalence of errors is the 24-hour news cycle, which has accelerated the race among news organizations to be first to break news. For example, Brian Ross, ABC’s chief investigative correspondent, broke an “exclusive” story on live TV in early December 2017. Ross reported that President Trump had ordered his former national security adviser, Michael Flynn, to discuss foreign policy with Russian officials during his campaign. The stock market immediately sank.
Later, Ross issued a “clarification” on ABC World News Tonight, stating that the order to contact Russia was given during the transition, not the campaign. ABC then issued a full correction and Ross was suspended for four weeks without pay.
The lack of trust in the the news media isn’t a recent epidemic; neither is error in journalism. But as journalist and computer scientist Jonathon Stray says, with the current explosion of information, it’s more important now than ever for newsrooms to get serious about accuracy so the public knows which sources can be trusted.
Callahan Peel is a senior in the journalism program at the University of Montana. She is President of Chi Chapter of Alpha Phi and works as the social media and web assistant for Montana Public Radio. When she isn’t diving into reporting assignments, Callahan can be found trail running in the wilderness or playing with her two Airedale terriers.
