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Corrections policies cause contention

Commentary

By Charles L. Overby
Chairman and CEO, The Freedom Forum

05.15.98

You would think that newspeople and the public could agree easily on something as basic as accuracy and corrections in news reports. Not so.

In The Freedom Forum's discussions with the public and the media for our "Free Press/Fair Press" project, we found disagreement even among newspeople about corrections policies.

A few observations from our forums:

• Some in the public think the basic system for corrections is flawed because reporters are defensive about errors. Most corrections occur after a reader or viewer complains to a reporter, and the reporter acknowledges the error and brings it to the attention of editors. Some think that is like seeking redress from the fox in the chicken house.
• Many news sources are reluctant to complain for fear of reprisal or damaging a relationship with a reporter.
• Most newspeople agree there are more errors, perhaps many more, than there are corrections daily. Howard Tyner, editor of the Chicago Tribune, has done some research in this area and found that an independent auditing group discovered hundreds of errors, large and small, in his newspaper every week.
• Most news folks think they have an adequate corrections policy.
• Very few corrections appear on television, even though news directors say they have corrections policies.
• Small, trivial facts are easy to get corrected in newspapers, but larger issues like omission of facts or incorrect framing of a story are almost impossible to get corrected.
• Some people say they rarely are quoted correctly in the paper. They say sometimes their printed quotes were better than what they said, but they just weren't accurate.

At our forum with publishers at their Dallas convention, Alan Horton, president of the newspaper division for E.W. Scripps Co., said his newspapers have a policy that requires reporters to read back quotes for accuracy, if asked, and to explain the context in which stories are being written.

Some newsrooms would react with horror to that suggestion. Reading a story or parts of a story to a source in advance has not been universally acceptable in the past. But others argue that the practice improves accuracy without requiring approval from the source.

What if a source said he/she meant to say something different from the actual quote? Horton said reporters should use the second quote. In practice, some newspeople will report both quotes. But many reporters are happy to practice "gotcha" journalism. If you said it, no matter how stupid it sounds, it's your problem.

Quotes are just one aspect of many relating to accuracy in daily news reports.

The public has higher expectations of media accuracy than ever before. Each editor or news director can set policies that will improve accuracy and enhance the perception of accuracy by the public.

This deserves more discussion in broader forums, but news executives don't need to wait to begin improvements in their corrections policies.

We plan to share exemplary practices in future reports. If you know of enlightened policies in this area, please let us know.