Star public editor: 2013 in corrections

 

By Kathy English, public editor for the Toronto Star

In a year dominated by coverage of Mayor Rob Ford and his numerous newsworthy antics, the Star, to its credit, got all the important Ford facts right with no significant corrections required.

 

By Kathy English, public editor for the Toronto Star

In a year dominated by coverage of Mayor Rob Ford and his numerous newsworthy antics, the Star, to its credit, got all the important Ford facts right with no significant corrections required.

One sliver of an error did slip through the, er, cracks in reporting on Ford and the crack cocaine video, however: that matter in which a city councillor was seen clipping his nails during a council meeting held shortly after the Star reported that two of its top investigative reporters had viewed a video of the mayor smoking (what they then said “appeared to be”) crack cocaine.

In an Opinion page column expressing the view that Toronto may never live down the shame of Mayor Ford, a Star columnist told you: “As I type this, Ford’s brother Doug is clipping his nails in council.”

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Really? As the Twitterati was quick to tell us, that wasn’t Doug Ford seen clipping his fingernails during the council meeting.

After our own rather absurd investigative efforts to verify this information with journalists who had witnessed and first reported the dirty deed, we confirmed the Star’s columnist did in fact name the wrong guy.

Actually, the wrong Doug.

The public record demanded correction to right this wrong. And so we have our 2013 Correction of the Year, my most unforgettable of this year’s tally of 403 corrections:

“A May 22 Opinion column about Mayor Rob Ford bringing shame to Toronto mistakenly referred to Ford’s brother Doug clipping his nails in council. In fact, it was Deputy Mayor Doug Holyday who was seen clipping his fingernails in council Tuesday.”

My runner-up in the “not quite right” or more precisely the “Oh my God, really” category of corrections resulted from a translation error in an Associated Press story about newly elected Pope Francis’ landmark meeting on reforming the Catholic Church. As the correction told you, “The article mistakenly said that Francis acknowledged that popes past had been infatuated with the pomp of the Vatican and its ‘courtesans.’ In fact, the Pope said ‘cortigiani,’ which translates as ‘courtiers.’”

Those two words are on the same page in my dictionary but worlds apart. “Courtesan” is “a woman who is a prostitute, especially one whose clients are men of rank or wealth” while “courtier” is “an attendant at a sovereign’s court.” Oops.

While all errors are cringeworthy, especially for the journalists who err, not all mistakes can or should be taken with any measure of lightness whatsoever. The most serious require sincere apology to those involved and newsroom action to aim to ensure such mistakes don’t happen again.

The Star’s most egregious error of 2013 had the dubious distinction of being duly noted by Craig Silverman of the Poynter Institute for Media Studies in his recent annual roundup of “best and worse media errors and corrections .” That mistake resulted in the Star’s first Page 1 apology in 18 years and newsroom-wide training in “ due diligence ” to make clear the Star’s standards of verification and fairness.

To spare all, I’ll spare readers the full details of the mistake here. Suffice to reiterate: a now retired MPP did not vacation in Mexico while on medical leave as the Star had so wrongly reported after misinterpreting — and not verifying — information found on Facebook. Certainly, the largely unprecedented front-page apology to the then-politician was in order here.

In 2013, the Star published 403 corrections to right errors published in the newspaper and, for the most part, online too. As well, a further 582 corrections were made to content published online only, up considerably from the 280 corrections to web-only content we noted last year. That increase is largely a result of increased efforts by the newsroom to report real-time online corrections to the public editor’s office and our own increased efforts to record those corrections as they occur.

The 403 print corrections are down just slightly from the 415 corrections published in 2012. That’s still 10 per cent more than the 366 errors corrected in 2011 and a continued cause for concern.

Of those 403 corrections, 98 — almost 25 per cent — were corrections to names that were misspelled or misstated and people misidentified. Another 49 were the result of wrong numbers. We all agree more training is required to prevent such preventable errors.

A total of 274 of the 403 errors were writers’ errors, mistakes made by reporters (192), columnists (40), freelance writers (31) editorial writers (5) and letter writers (5).

To continue reading this column, please go the thestar.com where it was originally published.

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