brad brace contemporary culture scrapbook

Almost half of the articles published by daily newspapers in the US contain one or more factual errors, and less than two per cent end up being corrected.

The findings are from a forthcoming research paper by an associate professor at the University of Oregon’s School of Journalism and Communication. The findings challenge how well journalism’s “corrections box” sets the record straight or serves as a safety valve for the venting of frustrations by wronged news sources.
The average US newspaper should expand by a factor of 50 the amount of space given to corrections, says Scott R Maier’s research. Maier, an associate professor at the University of Oregon’s School of Journalism and Communication, describes in a research paper his findings that fewer than 2 per cent of factually flawed articles are corrected at dailies.

The study’s central finding is sobering: 98 per cent of the 1,220 factual newspapers errors examined went uncorrected. The correction rate was uniformly low for each of the 10 newspapers studied, with none correcting even 5 per cent of the mistakes identified by news sources. While it is not plausible or arguably even desirable for every newspaper error to be detected and corrected, Maier noted, the study shows that the corrections box represents the “tip of the iceberg” of mistakes made in a newspaper, therefore providing only a limited mechanism for setting the record straight.

Maier’s findings also challenge journalists’ widely held perception that errors, when detected, are commonly corrected. Previous research showed that news sources brought errors to the attention of newspapers in only about 11 per cent of stories in which errors were identified. Newspapers can hardly be expected to correct errors they do not know were made.

This study, however, shows that even when errors were reported by news sources, the vast majority – 98 per cent – remained uncorrected. In fact, the corrections rate for reported errors is only slightly higher than for errant stories apparently found in error by someone other than the story’s primary source. This suggests that news managers should not rely on corrections as safety valve for the venting of frustrations by wronged news sources, Maier has argued.

Further study is needed to understand why errors, even when reported, go uncorrected. Perhaps news sources didn’t know to whom or how to properly report errors, Maier felt. Reporters and editors, understandably reluctant to make a public mea culpa with published corrections, may have ignored reported errors. Though the study examined only factual errors, differences also may exist between a journalist and a new source as to what constitutes inaccuracy, he pointed out.

Considering that over 60% of all news stories used by the press are actually U.S. government agency press releases, doesn’t this mean that the printed media in this country are fulfilling the same function as Pravda in the former Soviet Union?

PUERTO CABEZAS, Nicaragua – Soldiers searched for more bodies on Thursday after Hurricane Felix killed 38 people in Nicaragua, while 52 members of a group of Miskito Indians washed ashore alive in neighboring Honduras.

Dozens were still missing after Felix tore into Nicaragua’s swampy Caribbean coast late on Tuesday, destroying thousands of flimsy homes and making tracks through barely developed jungle areas even less passable than normal.

But local government officials said 52 bedraggled Miskitos, mainly fishermen, washed up in the Honduran port of Raya near the Nicaraguan border after being swept off a tiny island and surviving the storm clinging to boards and lifebuoys.

“Fifty-two Nicaraguan Miskitos, part of the 150 or so that had disappeared, were found in Honduran waters,” Carolina Echeverria, a deputy from Cabo Gracias a Dios on the border with Nicaragua, reported by telephone.

“They were holding onto planks and buoys for hours,” she said, after speaking to officials in Raya by radio.

She said around half of the survivors were in good enough health to be sent home on Thursday on a Nicaraguan Navy boat, while the other half were being taken to hospital in Honduras for treatment for exposure.

The turtle-fishing Miskito Indians, who live mainly in wooden shacks in isolated marshlands dotted with lagoons and crocodile-infested rivers, were hard hit by Felix. Some 35,000 Miskitos live in Honduras and more than 100,000 in Nicaragua.

Echeverria said the survivors had been on a small key fishing for lobster when the storm approached, and many more may still be unaccounted for.

RIVERS NEAR BURSTING

In Nicaragua, soldiers combed the area around Puerto Cabezas for more casualties while the Navy tried to reach settlements on marshy spits of land or on keys.

Felix crashed into the coast on Tuesday as an extremely powerful Category 5 hurricane but was downgraded to a tropical depression by Wednesday evening as it moved westward and drenched already waterlogged southeastern Mexico with rain.

Nicaraguan disaster prevention chief Col. Ramon Arnesto put the death toll there at 38, with dozens believed missing.

“There are a lot of missing people,” he told reporters on Wednesday, as people wept at the harbor in Puerto Cabezas for a dozen fishermen they said had not returned.

Visiting the area on Wednesday, President Daniel Ortega said about 9,000 homes had been destroyed. Residents and soldiers battled to clear the streets of uprooted trees.

“We are talking about really serious damage,” Ortega said.

Felix revived memories throughout Central America of Hurricane Mitch, which killed 10,000 people in 1998.

In the early hours of Thursday Felix’s eye was grinding through western Honduras, dropping sheets of rain. It left the capital Tegucigalpa relatively unscathed but flooded villages in the north and left rivers close to bursting their banks.

There were no reports of deaths in Honduras but local media said some 25,000 people were evacuated from their homes.

Felix came on the heels of another deadly Category 5 storm, Hurricane Dean, marking the first time on record that two Atlantic storms made landfall as Category 5 hurricanes in one season. Dean killed 27 people in the Caribbean and Mexico.

In Mexico, Hurricane Henriette lost strength as it drenched northern states on Thursday after lashing Los Cabos and killing seven people as it tore through the Gulf of California this week. Two more people were reported dead late on Wednesday in northern Sonora state.

Miskito is an indigenous language of Central America, spoken by nearly 200,000 people in Nicaragua, Honduras and Belize. Miskito, also known as Bahwika, Wangki, or Tawira, belongs to the Misumalpan language family, considered by some linguists to be a subset of the Chibchan language group. Another 100,000 people speak a second language called Miskito Coastal Creole, which is a mixture of Miskito, English, Spanish, and African languages that arose after colonization.

One (Un) Kum
Two (Deux) Wol
Three (Trois) Yumpa
Four (Quatre) Wol Wol
Five (Cinq) Matsip
Man (Homme) Waikna
Woman (Femme) Mairin
Dog (Chien) Yul
Sun (Soleil) Lapta
Moon (Lune) Kati
Water (Eau) Laya
White (Blanc) Pini
Red (Rouge) Pauni
Yellow (Jaune) Lalalni
Black (Noir) Siksa
Eat (Manger) Plunpisa
See (Voir) Kaikisa
Hear (Entendre) Walisa
Sing (Chanter) Aiwanisa
Leave (Partir) Mahka auya

LA CEIBA, Honduras — Hurricane Felix roared ashore early Tuesday as a fearsome Category 5 storm, the first time in recorded history that two top-scale storms have come ashore in the same season.

The storm hit near the swampy Nicaragua-Honduras border, home to thousands of stranded Miskito Indians dependent on canoes to make their way to safety. Twenty fishermen were missing, and communication to the area was cut off.

Meanwhile, off Mexico’s Pacific coast, tropical storm Henriette strengthened into a hurricane with 120 km/h winds and the U.S. National Hurricane Center said it was churning toward the upscale resort of Cabo San Lucas, popular with Hollywood stars and sea fishing enthusiasts.

Some 350 people were evacuated along Nicaragua’s coast as Felix approached. Many other Miskito Indians refused to leave low-lying areas and head to shelters set up in schools, and the newspaper La Prensa reported that 20 fishermen were missing.

With communication cut, it was impossible to find out what was happening as the storm’s winds hit the remote, swampy area, much of it reachable only by canoe. The Nicaraguan government sent in some soldiers before the storm and was preparing to send in more help once the hurricane passed.

Hurricane Dean came ashore just last month as a Category 5 storm, and Felix’s landfall marked the first time that two Category 5 hurricanes have hit land in a season since 1886, according to the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Only 31 such storms have been recorded in the Atlantic, including eight in the last five seasons.

“This is an extremely dangerous and potentially catastrophic hurricane. We just hope everybody has taken the precautions necessary to protect life and property,” Richard Pasch, a hurricane specialist at the National Hurricane Center, said Tuesday.

Off Mexico’s Pacific coast, Henriette strengthened into a hurricane and was on a path to hit the tip of the Baja California Peninsula on Tuesday afternoon. The storm had sustained winds of 120 km/h.

At 8 a.m. EDT it was centred about 130 kilometres south-southeast of the peninsula.

Before dawn Tuesday, strong waves pounded the resort’s beaches, rain fell in sheets and strong winds whipped palm trees. More than 100 residents spent the night in makeshift shelters as the storm approached, and more were expected to leave their homes Tuesday.

On Monday, police in Cabo San Lucas said one woman drowned in high surf stirred up by Henriette. Over the weekend, the storm caused flooding and landslides that killed six people in Acapulco.

In the final hours before hurricane Felix hit, Grupo Taca Airlines frantically airlifted tourists from the Honduran island of Roatan, popular for its pristine reefs and diving resorts, while the U.S. Southern Command said in a statement that a Chinook helicopter evacuated 19 U.S. citizens.

Another 1,000 people were removed from low-lying coastal areas and smaller islands.

Bob Shearer, 54, from Butler, Pa., said he was disappointed his family’s scuba diving trip to Roatan was cut short by the evacuation order.

“I only got seven dives in. I hope they didn’t jump the gun too soon,” he said as he waited for a flight home in the San Pedro Sula airport.

Felix was projected to rake central Honduras, slam into Guatemala and then cut across southern Mexico.

The storm was following the same path as 1998’s hurricane Mitch, a sluggish storm that stalled for a week over Central America, killing nearly 11,000 people and leaving more than 8,000 missing, mostly in Honduras and Nicaragua.

In 2006, Islamists strengthened their hold on Somalia, after capturing the southern port of Kismayo. Although they have no intention of crossing into neighbouring Kenya, the question is what effect their ascendancy will have on that country’s predominantly Muslim coast.

Although Somalia’s Islamists say that their aim is nothing more threatening than to remake the country as a peaceful and tolerant Islamic state, Somalia’s internationally recognised (but dreadfully weak) transitional government insists that they are an “al-Qaeda network”. A recent suicide bombing which narrowly missed the transitional president, Abdullahi Yusuf, and the killing of an elderly Italian nun working at a Mogadishu hospital, probably in retaliation for Pope Benedict XVI’s remarks on violence and Islam, confirmed the worst fears of some, including the United States. The Kenyan coast already has direct experience of al-Qaeda’s brand of violence—in 2002 it bombed a hotel full of Israelis in Mombasa, killing 16, and tried to shoot down an Israeli airliner—and the Nairobi-based intelligence community expects more. So people are nervous.

Kenya’s Muslims feel disenfranchised. They have had little access to national power, in contrast to neighbouring Tanzania, where Islamist rhetoric has been blunted by socialism and Muslims have held most of the high offices of state (see article). So far, however, Muslims on the Kenyan coast have usually been repulsed by jihadist rhetoric. But a revival of Arabic and access to Arab satellite television, linking local backwaters to a sometimes inflammatory message of Islam under siege, could change that.

Malindi is a case in point. The Muslim community there is taking steps to recover itself from what it calls the “corrosive” influence of tourism. The town’s beaches have been a tidy earner since 1498, when Vasco da Gama was welcomed ashore. Things have got out of hand since. “The Italians have ruined this town,” says a Muslim elder. Several thousand Italians now live in Malindi and it is not just the Italian women wandering half-naked through conservative bits of the town that upsets local Muslims. It is the drugs and the sex tourism that the Italians have brought with them since taking over the tourism industry in the 1980s. Most of the drug users in the town are Muslim boys. Some become donkeys for cocaine traffickers; Malindi has become a shipment point for Colombian cocaine. Underage Muslim girls are lured into prostitution. Tourists pay a premium for conservative girls: corruption is part of the thrill.

One reaction to this has been a growing opposition among the small but more Islamist Wahhabi community in Malindi. A more lasting reaction is what the more moderate Sunni elders call “awareness”—a renewed effort to raise up a generation of “pure” Muslims. Tahdhib school, in the centre of town, is pioneering a programme of “integrated education” which could spread along the coast. Children study the national curriculum in the morning and receive a Koranic education in the afternoon. No child can advance without passing exams in both secular and religious studies, and instruction is in English and Arabic. The teachers hope to produce both “good citizens of Kenya” and believers who will “close their eyes” to tourist excesses. Political discussion is avoided, although in 2006 the children were marched out to protest against Danish newspaper cartoons depicting the Prophet Muhammad.

Tourism is a soft target for jihadists and it has still has not recovered to pre-2002 levels. With its new mosques bristling against new casinos, Malindi feels vulnerable. “One bomb and it’s over for us for another five years,” says a hotel owner. Maybe, but the real losers would be local Muslims who already struggle to get by in the long tourist off-season.