Apparently all the pages of Le Devoir today were accidentally labelled Thursday. I’d understand accidentally putting 2007, or getting the date wrong, but how does no one notice the day of the week is incorrect?
As for the suggestion that, like a stamp with a mistake in it, these copies will be worth something someday: don’t hold your breath. Mistakes in newspaper folios are common, and embarrassing.
News is being circulated around about some embarrassing black eyes at the British press. (And really, when you think about British newspapers, it takes quite a doozie for a mistake to be considered newsworthy.) It seems that on the night of the New Hampshire presidential primary, the papers took pre-election opinion polls as gospel and wrote headlines as if Barack Obama had won it. In the end, he lost to Hillary Clinton.
The Independent, in its follow-up “apology”, throws out a litany of excuses (emphasis mine):
We could plead mitigating circumstances. The time difference works to the great disadvantage of the European and British press. Print deadlines gave us little choice but to trust the advance US polls. The unusually wide discrepancy between the exit polls and the actual vote became clear a good two hours after our final edition went to press. The exit polls were wrong; so was our gamble on Mr Obama.
At least this was only an early, if important, primary, and we were in the excellent company of most of the British press. It was hardly a howler like the Chicago Daily Tribune’s 1948 headline, declaring that Dewey had defeated Truman for the presidency. Nor was it a CBS moment – when in 2000 the U.S. network called Florida, and the presidency, for Gore.
But now technology means that newspapers don’t simply rely on print for the dissemination of news. Keep your eye on our website.
First of all, this is factually inaccurate. CBS never called the election for Gore. They, and many other media including Associated Press, called the state of Florida for Gore (after looking at exit polls for the peninsula but not the more conservative panhandle), but this was very early in the night. Western states were still voting, and nobody in their right mind would have called an election. They were talking about “momentum” and Bush’s declining chances, but that was about it.
The bad call on the election was later in the night, around 2am Eastern time, when the networks (starting with, of course, Fox News) called Florida for Bush. By that time, the other states were mostly decided, and that win put Bush over the top. An hour later they would find themselves having to eat crow again, calling the same state two different ways, both of them wrong.
I add this explanation not because I like to be nitpicky (though I do like to nitpick), but because if you’re giving a long explanation about how you screwed up an election call, you should probably get the facts in your excuses right.
Anyway, back to the excuses. Here they are again, paraphrased:
Do these sound like explanations a major respected news publication would give, or do they sound more like the excuses of a five-year-old who got caught doing something wrong?
Yeah, it sucks for British newspapers reporting on events in our hemisphere. They have to work into the wee hours of the morning, while we can take our time talking about them. It sucks that exit polls were so wrong in New Hampshire. It sucks that other media have called the race and you look like you’ve been scooped when you call it later.
Tough. That’s the business. It sucks for the sports editor when the big game of the evening has gone into quadruple overtime on the west coast, and they have to go to print without the final score. It sucks for the education reporter who won’t know until the morning whether schools are closed for the day. It sucks for the arts editor who has to rush a review of the evening concert into the paper at deadline (and the writer who has to leave the concert early to file). It sucks for every reporter who has to write the words “was to have” or “was expected to” because they can’t confirm that a planned activity has actually happened.
Working in the newspaper business means you have these problems, and you find ways to deal with them. You put in some filler for early editions, you write features instead of result stories. You write about what you know so far. You ask people to go online to find out how it ended. You make it clear in the paper that you don’t have the full story. People understand that.
When it comes to situations like election results, you have two choices at deadline: Be honest that you don’t know the result at press time, or gamble that the most likely answer is the correct one.
The British press chose the second option. And the disturbing thing is that it seems they’ll do it again the next time. Missing in the Independent’s excuse list is a vow not to do it again. Instead, they seem to imply that it wasn’t their fault, that this was a once-in-a-lifetime thing, an unforseeable reversal or a common unavoidable error that you should expect in journalism.
None of this is true. This was an entirely avoidable mistake, caused by a greedy desire to get an answer where none existed. You simply can’t call elections until votes are counted. The Brits chose to ignore that fact because it was inconvenient to them, and they have egg on their face as a result.
The Independent acknowledges that they gambled on the results. If this mistake has taught them anything, it’s that they shouldn’t gamble with the news, no matter how much the odds may be in their favour. Everyone will remember the one time they got it wrong.
UPDATE (Jan. 14): The Guardian’s self-important analysis points out that nobody would be stupid enough to try this with the outcomes of soccer matches, which are about as predictable.
From the website for an awesome-sounding new movie:
Dear Newline Cinema,
I’m available to proofread your websites in the future.
From a CanWest News Service story last week:
Prince Edward Island’s West Point Lighthouse is an icon. But now that icon is in danger of being claimed by the very element it guards against.
Water has eroded the dunes near the lighthouse so badly that there are concerns the building might collapse into the ocean.
So lighthouses guard against … water? That’s odd, I could have sworn that lighthouses were invented to warn ships about land. You’d think they’d already be well aware of the water surrounding them.
Saw this one in the paper last week.
I know the dollar was gaining fast, but that’s pretty impressive.
Regret the Error presents a roundup of this year’s funny corrections and cases of plagiarism and fabrication.
No Montreal media appear on either list, though the Toronto Star gets two dishonorable mentions, for prematurely killing off Morley Safer and for bringing the Detroit murder rate up by a factor of 50. The Ottawa Citizen, meanwhile, put a photo of an innocent man on a section front, identifying him as a pedophile.
Toronto Sun columnist Mark Bonokoski has a column (via Regret the Error and Toronto Sun Family) about errors in newspapers. He starts off talking about an error in the Toronto Star and then talks about some of his own. (Funny how media outlets have no problem talking about direct competitors by name when they’re pointing out their flaws.)
I suppose we can’t say he’s hypocritical, since he does self-criticize, but the Star has an online corrections page, while the Sun does not. And my experience with Sun papers have mostly involved hilarious headline mistakes and errors they made about me. Neither of these have since been corrected (at least not online).
Then again, as the Sun Family blog points out, the Star this week also admitted to plagiarizing the Sun.
The Toronto Star’s public editor talks to Regret the Error‘s Craig Silverman about his new book (via J-Source).
The article talks about the reluctance of journalists to admit their own mistakes. It’s something you find in all professions, but journalists have a special duty to get their facts right. In fact, it’s the only thing they have to do.
Naturally, the article talks about how great the Star is at their corrections (few Canadian publications have corrections pages) and how they want to get better.
One suggestion, that Silverman has I think given up making because few bother with it, is to actually correct articles online when you issue corrections about them.
As a random example, this article about Ontario’s civil courts makes a simple error, saying that someone is currently in a position when she’s not. The correction is online and everything, but the original error is still there (about halfway down the article), and no mention is made of a correction.
For a more serious example, this correction notes that the Star violated a publication ban by revealing the names of victims in an inquiry. Unfortunately, at least one of the original articles, which has the full names of six children in it, is still online. (I won’t link to it because I don’t want to violate the publication ban myself, but it’s Googlable.)
In case the nature of the problem isn’t blatantly obvious by now, the original articles are emailed, del.icio.used, Dugg and otherwise passed around, and people can read them days after the fact, learning the false information with no clue that a correction has already been issued.
Newspapers, radio stations and TV networks can’t go back in time and unpublish something, but website articles can and must be altered to correct inaccuracies, preferably with a note describing the nature of the error and how it was corrected.
Why is that so hard to understand?
Via Regret the Error, the National Post has one of the most unhelpful corrections in the history of newspapers:
Due to a production error, incorrect information appeared on the sports results page in some editions of yesterday’s paper.
The Post regrets the error.
So what was the “incorrect information”? The page, which appeared on Nov. 8, was in fact the scores page from Oct. 23, a full two weeks earlier. It had all the scores from Oct. 22 games, as well as things like the over/under for the Red Sox/Rockies matchup in Game 1 of the World Series.
It wasn’t all bad. It was nice seeing “Canadiens 6 Bruins 1” again.
But you’d think the Post could just admit someone screwed up and put an old page in, instead of obfuscating the mistake with correctionese.
CBC has a story about a new protest by French-superiority groups Impératif français and Mouvement Montréal français: They want to change when “For English, press 9” appears on government-run automatic telephone menus.
As it stands, many government departments have it at the beginning of their menus, so that anglphones don’t have to sit through French options they don’t understand. But the French groups want the option to be read only at the end of the French menus.
I honestly have no words to express how stupid this is. Arguing over automatic telephone menu orders is trivial enough, but what exactly are they trying to accomplish? Save time for francophones who have to endure that two-second delay? Help anglophones learn French by forcing them to sit through menu options?
No, this is just a pointless power grab and pissing contest. And unfortunately for us, the government actually listened. So if you have to wait through a five-minute list of menu options before finding out what number to press to get English service, you know who to blame.
During the CBC News at Six report on this scandal, it featured a few man-on-the-street soundbites from Montrealers about the issue. Naturally, the people interviewed said what the journalists could not: That this is a stupid issue to focus on and people should get a life.
But one of the interviewees defended the English language (because in Quebec, English needs a defence), saying it was the most commonly-spoken language in the world.
Of course, as any knower-of-pointless-facts would tell you, that’s incorrect. Mandarin (Chinese), with over a billion speakers, is spoken by more than twice as many people as English (which is second or third with over 300-500 million, depending on your source). French is ranked in the teens with 130 million (60 million natively).
But this apparent misinformation went uncorrected by the journalist. Why? Did she not know this (in which case, why didn’t she confirm it?), or are statements from random people on the street not subject to the same fact-checking treatment as those from journalists?
Another thing mentioned on the CBC evening news today was the creation of the Office québécois de la langue anglaise, a bad joke grass-roots English rights group that hopes to pressure businesses into providing bilingual services. Considering the word “racism” appears on their forum, you can guess what kind of people this website is attracting. No doubt it will serve to hurt its cause more than it helps, by propagating the angryphone stereotype.
(UPDATE: Patrick Lagacé and his commenters have some things to say about this new group)
UPDATE (Nov. 10): We should send the Anglo Rights Brigade to Laval University, where it seems they’re clearly needed.
Pop quiz: What’s wrong with this CanWest E! web ad?
The following don’t count:
Pop quiz: What’s wrong with this page at the MetroMedia website:
The winner gets half this blog’s gross revenues from last month and the pride of being smarter than an advertising agency.
Radio-Canada reports on a protest today against extending Cavendish Boulevard to Toupin, but apparently confuses it with the extension of Cavendish into Cote-Saint-Luc.
It’s a simple mistake to make, and almost understandable, but it’s still not what they’re protesting.
I’m listening to CBC Radio (I oblige myself to do so at least once a year — besides, it’s “So Montreal” according to the marketing bureaucrats in Toronto).
I’m listening to the news, which is mostly about the three by-elections going on today in Quebec, and the possibility that the NDP might win a seat in Outremont. At the end of the report came this line:
“The two other seats are currently held by the Bloc Québécois.”
While I’m sure everyone knows what that means (that they were previously held by BQ members), it’s still technically wrong. The seats are vacant after the resignations of Yvan Loubier (Feb. 21) and Michel Gauthier (July 29).
There’s nothing better on tonight (except re-runs of Family Guy/American Dad on Global, Anchorman on ABC, the NFL’s New England Patriots on NBC/TSN, and the Weather Network’s long-term forecasts), so I’m watching the Emmys.
Of course, it’s not enough to be watching the Emmys, you have to read someone liveblogging it too. Something to keep you entertained during Ray Romano’s monologue. (It’s clear why some of the awards were previously presented, because they needed more time for long, unfunny monologues and skits.)
There’s a few options for Emmy liveblogging, but I’ll point to two with opposite mentalities:
FOX has five people you’ve never heard of sitting in the audience with blackberries in their hands, contributing to a blog on its website. The blackberries apparently prevent them from using punctuation, capital letters, or from spelling anyone’s name right. Here’s a sampling of some of the comments:
Most of the other posts have about the same level of insight and grammar.
On the other side of the spectrum, The Gazette’s Basem Boshra is sitting in front of a TV liveblogging the Emmys for the Inside the Box blog. A sampling:
It’s not like the latter tells me much I couldn’t tell from simply watching the show. But at least it doesn’t treat me like an idiot.
UPDATE: From Sunday’s Gazette:
Sacrilege! How could they get the name of his show wrong?