The Problem with Correcting Post-Publishing

Alex MacLeod
am892313@ohio.edu


The majority of news publications have the habit of making errors, publishing the story, and only correcting the errors after publication-when the story has already proliferated.  This can be problematic for many reasons.

News publications often times don't scour their work for errors because in news, timing is everything.  Journalists want to be the first to cover a topic, and therefore the most read and ideally the most popular and profitable.

Profit affects journalists more than they would like to admit.  Ethically and technically, if journalists are so committed to the truth, it shouldn't necessarily matter who is the first to publish a story.  Yet any publication would tell you that it is extremely important for them to be first. To create ground-breaking news.

Ultimately, being the first is about being the most read or viewed, and creating the most profits.

And in the race to be first, mistakes are made.  It happens often.  Typically small errors that can be overlooked, but sometimes larger errors that can mislead the nation.

Almost all journalists have made mistakes.  Today it is even more common.  Almost all newsrooms no longer have ombudsmen, and many newsrooms are under the new difficulties of losing money to the digital world, and having less time and resources.

Reporter Kathryn Schultz wrote in her Time article, "reporters increasingly resemble doctors in an understaffed emergency room, working under immense time pressure with inadequate resources."

Most journalists are very open and honest with admitting their mistakes and being transparent.  The article will be edited with the corrections highlighted, and apologies will be made.

Cartoon from https://www.cartoonstock.com/directory/t/truth.asp

This system works for the religious reader, but not for everyday shufflers and social media users.  How many readers never see those corrections?  How many times was an erroneous story spread by word-of-mouth?

Things like this can only further proliferate.  Noah Tavlin explains in his Ted Talk how unverified wiki-facts can be added to a reparable news story and then later that news source can be cited as the source for that very same wiki information; creating a circle of bad facts.

Its not clear how reporters should go about solving this problem, but it starts with editors fact-checking and using only reliable sources.

Journalists have to start being more careful, because things now spread 100 times as fast in the digital world, and a correction in the next day's newspaper is no longer sufficient.