Swallow Your Pride: Kill Duck Before Serving

By J. Lawrence Scholer | Wednesday, May 29, 2002

Pundits have recently been quite prodigious in their criticism of the bias that pervades most of today's major media outlets. Bernard Goldberg's book, Bias: A CBS Insider Exposes How the Media Distort the News, made headlines and topped best-seller lists, earning Goldberg the wrath of his colleagues. This summer Ann Coulter will release Slander: Liberal Lies About the American Right, another indictment of today's liberal media.

Bias in the media twists and distorts the news to get a political agenda across. But, what happens when the media get the facts completely wrong? Surely, such an abuse is too much for the public to tolerate. Well, it happens every day with little notice by readers. Newspapers, however, do not let these errors slip by—such is the purpose of the correction.

In Kill Duck Before Serving: Red Faces at The New York Times, Linda Amster and Dylan Loeb McClain have compiled hundreds of corrections printed by the Times. Amster is the manager of news research for the New York Times, and McClain is the manager of graphics for Business Day.

Amster and McClain culled approximately 20,000 corrections—far from the whole Times' correction corpus—and most of these were taken from the last few years. To scour the thousands of rolls of microfilm, as would be necessary to review pre-electronic archives, would prove impossible for a human in one lifetime. The Times publishes six to seven corrections a day—each day the Times publishes 138,000 words of news each day and 317,000 words on Sunday.

While the authors have not pinpointed the exact date of the birth of the correction, it is by no means a modern creation. On July 28, 1931, the Times printed an advertisement for a volume of Edna St. Vincent Millay's poetry with the headline 'Immoral Poetry.' The advertiser, of course, wanted 'Immortal Poetry.'

Responding to his business manager about this incident, Adolph Ochs, the publisher who saved the Times from bankruptcy, wrote, 'I regret to say that I think the error was to their advantage.' He considered running a correction as 'an interesting item besides being an act of justice.'

The Times, however, had not been error free prior to the 1931 incident. On November 5, 1908, this correction appeared at the bottom of the front page:

Girl Wasn't Attacked by Monkey

The New York papers of Oct. 27 printed a story from Montclair, NJ, telling how an escaped monkey had attacked two Montclair young women while they were walking in the woods at Montclair Heights. The father of one of them, Charles B. Wood, has called The Times's attention to the fact that his little daughter had not been away from her home for some days at the time mentioned, and that the incident as related was without foundation.

Today's newspaper readers have surely come to recognize a correction as a daily feature in newspapers. The regularity of corrections, however, is only a few decades old. In 1970, A. M. Rosenthal, the managing editor, made the inclusion of corrections a Times policy. In 1972, he created a special section for daily corrections. Other newspapers soon followed suit.

Not all of the corrections in Kill Duck Before Serving are as bizarre as the monkey incident. Most don't correct total fabrications of news; rather, most simply correct a muddling of the facts.

Transcription errors and misquotes are the basis of many corrections. A May 20, 2000, a correction concerning Barnard College Commencement student speaker, Melissa Marrus, stated that Marrus was incorrectly quoted and corrected the matter: 'She applauded the Class of 2000 for having pushed the college to institute 'one of the most progressive sexual misconduct policies in the nation'—not the most progressive condom distribution policy.' Quite a difference, but it was a Commencement at Barnard—either statement would have been quite likely.

On August 10, 1995, the Times printed a correction after misquoting Jamil Abdullah Al-Amin, the former H. Rap Brown. Al-Amin, a Muslim cleric and convicted cop killer, said in 1967, as a leader of the Student Non-Violent Co-ordinating Committee, that violence was 'as American as cherry pie.' The Times quoted him as saying 'apple pie.' El-Amin's career has degraded since that error—he's spending the rest of his life in prison for murder.

Some corrections fix errors that could have led to serious health problems. A February 15, 1996, correction reads: 'An article about benefits of fiber in the diet reversed the estimated effects of fat and fiber intake on the heart attack risk. A person with a 50 percent chance of having a heart attack might be able to reduce that to a 40 percent by eating 10 more grams of fiber, not fat, a day.'

Other times the reporter seems to be somewhat preoccupied with his subject matter. A May 17, 1986, correction stated, 'A report about the use of ibogaine to fight drug addiction misstated the preferred means of administering it. The chemical should be taken orally—but not by injection, which greatly increases its toxicity, or through the nose, which would be ineffective.' Ibogaine may be for drug abusers, but at least give the druggies some dignity.

Some corrections fix items that only one with an incredible eye for detail could catch. This mistake was surely brought to an editor's attention by a very finicky mathematician: 'An article incorrectly stated the number of positions possible for the Rubik's Cube. It is 43,252,003,274,489,856,000.'

Other corrections do not correct misinformation in an article, but rather appease readers who believed they had outwitted an editor. A January 26, 1997, correction targets readers who believed a printed recipe was incorrect—it seems Miss Annie's Cheese Biscuits proved 'unusually heavy.' The Times stuck with its recipe, however, and wrote, 'The amount of chesse in the biscuits—stated correctly in the recipe—accounts for their sturdiness.'

Literature and cinema are filled with instances of a character supposedly dying, but then unexpectedly returning unscathed and alive. Mark Twain, for one, had this happen to Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn—after being lost in the cave, they witnessed their own funeral. The Times does this to real people quite consistently. A March 17, 1986, correction read, 'A Miami dispatch about Frank A. Sturgis, a Watergate burglar who says he will try to reopen his case, described Federal District Judge John J. Sirics incorrectly. He is alive.' Another example proved a bit more morbid: 'An article about the growing number of young Orthodox Jewish couples moving back to the Lower East Side of Manhattan misstated the circumstances that allowed one couple to take over her grandfather's apartment on Grand Street. He moved out; he did not die.'

Even the Times's cultural critics are not immune to errors. A May 16, 1996, piece corrected a mistitling of one of Terry McMillan's novels: 'It is 'Waiting to Exhale,' not 'Learning to Exhale.'" An insightful review, no doubt. A December 9, 1989 piece corrected a serious misinterpretation from a performance of the Tempest: 'The actors's intent was to portray 18th-century gentlemen taking snuff, not cocaine.' More than a few strange things occurred on that island, but cocaine wasn't one of them.

After glancing through this compilation, one becomes somewhat skeptical of the newswriting process. With all these mistakes, do editors even exist anymore? They do, but times have changed. The proofreaders of old, who sat scouring page after page of copy under dim light, no longer exist—they fell from existence in the Seventies; computers usurped their position. 'Those regiments of keyboard operators and proofreaders were the best-educated of craft workers, and their incidental discoveries rescued many a writer's reputation,' writes Allan Siegal, an assistant managing editor for the New York Times, in the introduction. Sadly, those green-visored men are but a memory.

Since the advent of computers, the process of publishing a newspaper has simplified. Today, when a reporter submits a story, it moves through a story editor, a copy editor, and a copy chief in that order. The editors at the copy desk check the article for judgment, structure, and language; and then write headlines. The editors only fact check when time permits—such a responsibility is the reporter's.

In this age when the supposed impartial media often exhibits a strong bias, perhaps the printed correction is a last vestige of truth and honesty in the media. Or, maybe it is just the opposite. Former Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach, once sent a angry letter to a Times editor about the Times correction policy. The policy, according to Katzenbach, might cause readers to believe that the uncorrected portion of the Times is accurate.

Swallow Your Pride: Kill Duck Before Serving

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