Reign of Error-The average newspaper corrects very few of its factual errors, says professor

[babylonsister]

Reign of Error
The average newspaper corrects very few of its factual errors, says professor.
By Jack Shafer
Posted Wednesday, Aug. 15, 2007, at 6:08 PM ET

The average newspaper should expand by a factor of 50 the amount of space given to corrections if Scott R. Maier's research is any guide.

Maier, an associate professor at the University of Oregon's School of Journalism and Communication, describes in a forthcoming research paper his findings that fewer than 2 percent of factually flawed articles are corrected at dailies.

Maier's study relied on data gathered from 10 metropolitan newspapers: the Boulder Daily Camera, the Charlotte Observer, the Detroit Free Press, the Grand Forks Herald, the Lexington Herald-Leader, the Miami Herald (Broward Edition), the Philadelphia Inquirer, the San Jose Mercury News, the Tallahassee Democrat, and the Wichita Eagle. Starting on an arbitrary date, researchers clipped from each newspaper every locally produced and bylined story from Page One and the metro, business, and the lifestyle sections until they had collected 400. The study culled no sports stories, opinion pieces, columns, or reviews. (For reasons I won't go into here, only 200 news stories were gathered from the Free Press and 200 from the Inquirer, making for a total of 3,600 articles.)

The researchers then contacted a primary news source named in each of the stories and asked him to complete a survey about the accuracy of the piece. A news source was defined as a witness or participant with firsthand knowledge of the events described in the story. Only "hard," objective errors alleged by the news sources were included, and the study assumed that the factual assessments of the news sources were correct.

The results might shock even the most jaded of newspaper readers. About 69 percent of the 3,600 news sources completed the survey, and they spotted 2,615 factual errors in 1,220 stories. That means that about half of the stories for which a survey was completed contained one or more errors. Just 23 of the flawed stories—less than 2 percent—generated newspaper corrections. No paper corrected more than 4.2 percent of its flawed articles.

Obviously, a newspaper can't publish a correction until it learns of its error. But the studied dailies performed poorly when informed of their goofs. Maier found that 130 of the news sources reported having asked for corrections, but their complaints elicited only four corrections.

more...

http://www.slate.com/id/2172283/fr/flyout

[hobbit709]

1. When a large percentage of the people with degrees in journalism

don't even have a good grasp of English grammar and spelling, you can't expect too much in the way of accuracy either.

[fasttense]

2. Maybe this is why newspapers' circulations have been dropping. n/t