brad brace contemporary culture scrapbook

September 6, 2007

New revelation: Almost 98 per cent of errors in US newspapers go uncorrected

Filed under: General,media — admin @ 8:06 am

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?

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