By Matt Skillman.
On November 3, 1948, the Chicago Tribune made one of the most memorable journalistic errors ever. One of the Tribune’s veteran political analysts predicted the defeat of Harry Truman during the presidential election. Truman won. More recently, CNN retracted a story that wrongly tied former White House staffer Anthony Scaramucci to a Russian investment fund. This led to three journalists resigning from CNN.
Journalists make mistakes just like any other human on this earth, but loyal readers and viewers of news expect the information they receive to be accurate and fair. Mistakes are easy to make; it is the corrections that some seem to struggle with. But admitting to these mistakes is one of the ways journalists can maintain the trust of news consumers.
A big problem that news organizations have with corrections is often, they simply don’t make them. Scott Maier, a professor at the University of Oregon’s School of Journalism, tracked 1,220 news stories identified by news sources as factually flawed. Of those, corrections were published in only 26 of them, a corrections rate of less than two percent. Another study he conducted found that 97 percent of factual errors pointed out to 10 different newspapers were not corrected. If that’s not enough, Maier also surveyed readers who found errors in newspapers. Only 1 in 10 readers told the news source there was an error. Some participants said they never would expect a newspaper to respond if a correction was sent. If the media won’t let people know they are willing to fix errors, then no one will report them. And if they aren’t reported, then articles will continue to be riddled with errors.
Make corrections plain
What’s a good way to inform the audience that corrections will be made? One option is to make it obvious when articles have been corrected. The text of this article from Politico was corrected, but the explanation is at the bottom.
But few online readers actually make it all the way to the end. A study by Slate found that most of their sites’ readers read only about 50 percent of any given article, especially when they have to scroll.
Other news organizations like The Washington Post and USA Today note corrections at the top of a story and make the correction in the text. USA Today actually has a page on its website that tracks every single correction ever made since January of 2015.
This approach tells readers right at the top that the original story contained an error, spells out the error and provides the correct information.
“We are in an age where transparency is more important,” said Eric Nelson of the Kansas City Star in a phone interview. In the context of corrections, transparency means explaining what was wrong and sometimes why the error was made in the first place. The Star joined the Facebook Journalism Project last October to increase interaction with readers and use the social media platform to keep readers up to date on stories and news updates. “We want to get to a point where people want to know when there are changes to a story,” Nelson said. So far, Nelson says readers are surprised by the increase in interaction, but support it.
Share your policy
Having a clear, accessible policy explaining this is helpful to readers and viewers in understanding the process. The Washington Post’s corrections policy says, “Clarifications and corrections should be clear, concise and direct. They must be comprehensible to anyone who reads them, including readers who may have missed the story that is being corrected. Anyone reading the correction should be able to understand how and why the mistake has been corrected.” It would help, too, if news sites made it easy for users to report errors. Most of them don’t. To find out how to submit a correction request, a Post reader would need to navigate to the help section, then click “journalism” and then “contact the newsroom.”
The Report an Error Alliance, an ad hoc group, urges newsrooms to make it much simpler. “Giving site visitors an easy-to-find, easy-to-use “report an error” button is a way of saying to them that you care about accuracy, you want to know when you make errors, and you’re conscientious about fixing them,” the group says. “It’s like putting a ‘you can trust this’ badge on everything you publish.” The Post is a member of the group but hasn’t followed its advice as yet.
Corrections also should be labeled as such. Craig Silverman, author of a book on media accuracy, “Regret the Error,” says newsrooms should not use words like “update” or “note” in corrections boxes because they imply that no mistake was made in the first place.
Another reason for having a corrections policy is because corrections look different on different platforms. WCPO-TV in Cincinnati not only has a clear corrections policy on its site, it lists all the stories that have been corrected on the same page. Sometimes corrections also are made on the air, but not always.
“The decision hangs in the balance of how important it (the correction) is compared to how much time you want to take out of your newscast,” News Director Chip Mahaney said in a phone interview. For TV news, Mahaney said correcting an error on a newscast really depends on how important an error is to a story. But he wants to ensure that as many viewers as possible can see the corrected information. That’s why when a significant error is made, the correction is made not only on the next broadcast, but the next comparable broadcast. For example, if an error happens on their noon program, they will give a correction on that evening’s newscast as well as the noon news the following day.
WCPO also reveals on the newscast who reported the error, if it’s someone outside the newsroom. Mahaney recalled a story where a person who was interviewed called in to report an error. The station made the correction and thanked the person for calling in it in. Mahaney said the viewer was very grateful to be recognized and most importantly that the correction was made.
Correct on social media
On Twitter, errors are spotted quickly and can spread like wildfire. “Full transparency—which includes researching the extent of inaccuracies and disclosing the editorial practices that allowed them to occur—is even more important in a digital culture, when the story of journalism-gone-wrong can go viral before the offending organization has a chance to address it,” said Alexis Sobel Fitts in the Columbia Journalism Review in 2014.
Slate had to rectify a mistake when it posted the following tweet.
Obviously this is not Vladimir Putin. Instead of just deleting the tweet, Slate social media editor Jeremy Stahl used a different strategy.
Stahl simply added the correction as a reply to the tweet. If a user replies to his or her own tweet, the reply will show up immediately to the user’s followers. It is also interesting to note that at the time of this screen grab, the original tweet had 299 retweets while the correction had 767. So users who saw the error made sure others could see the correction.
Stahl believes there are very few circumstances where a tweet should be totally deleted. In an interview with Poynter, Stahl said, “In the past year (2014), I’d say, I’ve started correcting mistakes within tweets as replies. Prior to that, I was running separate correction tweets after making errors, but then I realized that the original incorrect tweets were still out there and if people didn’t see both tweets they’d miss the correction. This seems to be an effective way of not only issuing a correction, but indicating the error on the mistaken copy.”
For more proof that policies matter, the Maier study cited earlier found that when National Public Radio announced a more detailed approach to identifying and making corrections in 2004, its corrections page had as many error posts in one month as it had in the previous two years combined.
Journalists need to admit their mistakes and correct them, making their audience aware of both the error and the correction. They need to make it easy for the audience to report mistakes and get them fixed. When journalists can be humble enough to admit mistakes and willing to correct them, they can create a better relationship with their readers and viewers and earn their trust.
Matthew Skillman is journalism student at the University of Montana. As an intern at ABC-Fox Montana, he covered floods and the 2017 Montana Special Election. After graduation, he will commission as a second lieutenant in the United States Army Signal Corp. He will be stationed at Camp Humphries, South Korea next year. Matthew grew up in Ennis, Montana, a small town of about 600 people. When Matthew isn’t on a story he enjoys hiking, trail running, reading the Bible, traveling and petting every dog he sees.
