PERSPECTIVES ON THE TIMES
Delusions of Accuracy
Journalists need to get more comfortable with mistakes. We might as well; there are probably a few in most of our stories. And it's the best way to fight them.
Recently, on WNYC, New York City's public radio outlet, USA Today editor Karen Jurgensen said she found an error in virtually every story written about her. Her interviewer, John Solomon, went on to cite studies showing that about half of all articles have at least one error. My experience is more in line with Jurgensen's: In my three years as a free-lance fact-checker for the Columbia Journalism Review, I have never checked a story that had no mistakes, whether five pages long or two paragraphs.
For me, this puts the current debate over corrections into perspective. Revelations of Jayson Blair's fifty or so corrections during his four years at The New York Times (apart from his plagiarism and fabrication) had a number of journalists saying proudly that they would have been fired for far less. That sentiment is scary, not least because it encourages delusions of accuracy.
Consider that CJR's authors tend to be respected, skilled, conscientious, and working on long deadlines; and from what I have seen they all make mistakes. Just for variety, I called fact-checking chiefs at a couple of prominent publications, who agreed that mistakes are the rule, not the exception. Yvonne Rolzhausen, a senior editor at The Atlantic Monthly, couldn't be sure she had ever seen a mistake-free article in eight years, but she says, "I doubt it, honestly."
In fairness, some of the "mistakes" I find are matters of interpretation, and authors usually agree to change them. Virtually all articles, though, contain errors on objective matters of fact: a year slightly off; old data; misspellings; widely reported information taken from secondary sources, but wrong. And of course, "facts" pulled from the writer's mental archives. Errors often turn up when the author says, "You don't need to check that, I know that's right." I can sometimes hear hostility at the beginning of the fact-checking process and shame at the end from the same person. Neither makes any sense to me, knowing what I know now — except when I get fact-checked myself.
Pound for pound, the most mistake-packed article I have ever checked was written by a Pulitzer Prize winner. As I approached the job, I felt I was on a futile mission. The piece seemed fine, the facts made sense, and most important, the narrative voice spoke with total authority. I could not imagine finding any mistakes here, but I'm paid by the hour so I set to work. Immediately, I found a significant error in the lead, then a cascade. The author, when asked for backup materials, moved from impatience to outright anger; then, when presented with the corrections, to gracious cooperation.
On the other hand, one of the most accurate articles I've checked — just one mistake, plus another the author had already caught and called in — was written by a former Los Angeles Times lawyer, Jeffrey S. Klein.
Journalists surely make mistakes often, but I think we don't — or can't — admit it to ourselves because the idea of a mistake is so stigmatized. It's a Catch-22. I think some reporters and their editors start to believe that unless a reader or listener telephones with a correction, they've made no mistakes. Then enough time goes by and they think they've gotten beyond mistakes. So then why double-check facts, especially the most basic ones? Why look for mistakes in reporting they know is good, when mistakes are so bad? In a perverse turnabout, the intense fear of mistakes just makes for more mistakes.
It would be nice if there were time and money to fact-check all our daily reporting, but there isn't. So mistakes need to be destigmatized, or re-stigmatized and dealt with accordingly. They should be treated like language errors, so reporters feel free to correct them at any stage in the process. It should raise no eyebrows to tell an editor, twenty minutes after you hit "send," "Wait, I got something wrong!" And in fact-heavy writing, we should know how important it is to seek errors out, because they are almost certainly there.
It would help if news consumers felt connected enough to us to
point out a mistake every time they find one. But they don't,
except perhaps in smaller markets where they feel they know us
personally. So it's up to us to face reality. Doing otherwise
may lead to fewer corrections, but that's not the same thing
as accuracy.
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