No. 13 for February 2003
Instant Credibility Busters
A recent headline reads, “$215,000,000 lures hoard of ticket buyers.” The correct word is “horde.”
An AP map the same day on a story about tornado damage has Interstate Highways “1,” “2,” “4” and “5” (twice) running through Mississippi. It’s I-10, I-20, I-40, I-55 and I-59.
A headline refers to “Families in anguish over grizzly finding” of bodies around a Georgia crematorium. The word is “grisly.” Yet another headline tells us that “Suspected drunk driver kills mother, 3 children.” This not only essentially convicts the driver for being drunk and for killing the four, but also incorrectly uses “drunk” instead of “drunken.”
A national newspaper runs a headline “Gun Fingerprinting’ Firm Misses Mark.” The story’s main thrust was about National Rifle Association lobbying against a system to create a file of the striations each gun’s barrel puts on a bullet. Later, the paper runs a correction that the headline “wasn’t intended to imply that the company or its technology was flawed.”
These are all instant credibility busters, things we must try our utmost to avoid. We can debate endlessly about whether to use a comma or semicolon, whether this or that word is jargon – but it’s all just moving deck chairs around the Titanic if we don’t first address these larger issues that go to accuracy and tone.
First, however, turn to the person next to you in the newsroom and congratulate him or her for a job largely well done. Given the number of words and stories we produce daily, often with incomplete information, our error rates are amazingly low.
Yet a 1999 study for the American Society of Newspaper Editors found that “more than a third of the public – 35 percent – see spelling or grammar mistakes in their newspaper more than once a week and 21 percent see them almost daily.” Researcher Scott Maier found in a study of The News & Observer in Raleigh, N.C., that more than half the paper’s local stories had some error in the eyes of news sources.
“People get very angry when they see mistakes, especially mistakes that go uncorrected,” said Howard Tyner when he was editor of the Chicago Tribune. “It’s a credibility issue. If people are thinking about getting rid of you anyway, why serve up a big softball?”
And readers do notice – and write, judging by letters to the editor. There was the one who wanted to know how to find the obviously strong “wench” used to lift a scoreboard into place. Another notes, “Many of these errors completely reverse what I perceive as the intent of the message.”
Still another reader, upset by basic errors about calibers and similar, easily checked facts in a gun story, cheekily proposed creating a “Newspaper and Information Confirmation Service” and a five-day waiting period similar to that for gun purchases so the agency could check the facts in stories.
But a 1988 letter to the editor of her local newspaper by Marilyn L. Hemingway of South Carolina best focuses what is at stake. Hemingway disputed a statement in a story that an intern during the term of former University of South Carolina President James Holderman was the school’s first black homecoming queen. The story had been picked up by the AP from a major metropolitan newspaper and reprinted in her paper.
It was a small part of a larger and more important story about shenanigans during Holderman’s term. Yet, Hemingway wrote, “That a Pulitzer Prize-winning paper, an international news organization and a statewide paper with numerous copy editors, reporters and proofreaders could not get a simple fact straight allows the integrity of the entire article to be examined.”
“USC has had at least four black homecoming queens,” she wrote. “To obtain this information is one of the simplest problem of this hectic world. Someone should have picked up the phone and called USC’s public information department.”
We can debate whether in some cases it’s that easy. But Hemingway’s point is important – the credibility of an entire, important, article was damaged in her eyes by one disputed fact that could have been checked.
Readers don’t care about our workload, about late copy or about whether we just had to push through a dozen or more stories in two hours. Nor should they, any more than we do when we as civilians, not journalists, deal with our insurer, our bank, or the clerk at the license bureau. We just want it now, and we want it right.
Journalists have huge discrepancy detectors when dealing with others. We need to keep them running when we sit down to write and edit. Don’t suspend disbelief; use common sense. Brush up on those homophones – hoard vs. horde, grisly vs. grizzly. Watch for discrepancies – why were there two I-5’s listed on that Mississippi map? Even without knowing how interstate highways are numbered (west to east in odd numbers, south to north in even ones), seeing two highways with the same number should have sent an editor or designer scrambling for an atlas.
Pay attention to tone – instead of calling someone a suspected whatever, find another way. Sometimes the plain facts are best: “Mother, 3 children die as van runs down family.” Don’t abandon cuteness, but if you think cute is called for, redouble your efforts to make sure it’s the right time and place and that it fairly captures the essence of the story.
In other words, ask hard questions. They are as appropriate inside the newsroom as outside.
And remember Marilyn Hemingway, who also wrote, “The reading public refuses to be insulted …”
Doug Fisher, a former AP news editor, teaches journalism at the University of South Carolina and can be reached at dfisher@sc.edu or 803-777-3315.