Media Law
We all make mistakes. In the news media, however, errors are not easily forgiven; nor should they be when the business is supposed to be devoted to accuracy or at minimum to the avoidance of inaccuracy.
Some errors are very human and even embarrassingly amusing because they are so obvious.
For example, the switch of a picture so wrong face goes with name - or vice versa. This happened two weeks ago in the sports pages of an area newspaper (not the Town Crier) when under high school "athletes of the week" an East Palo Alto sophomore boys basketball player was "shown" with very long hair and lipstick. His counterpart, a girls basketball senior from Belmont? She "had" the thin mustache.
Both were smiling in their pictures but it took the technologies of cutting, pasting/taping and photo copying to get corrected versions for display, distribution and any archives.
We can laugh about something like this, but in reality, it pains at least a bit, disappoints and is not totally forgotten. Especially by the news subjects and, in this case, nearly any interested or regular reader.
Research on accuracy in journalism reinforces major long-term concerns. Errors do reflect on the profession and accumulate over time. A mistake in one place may well suggest others and doubts elsewhere.
The American Society of Newspaper Editors last December reported from an extensive survey that more than one-third of readers said they see spelling or grammatical mistakes in their newspapers at least once a week; more than 20 percent said daily.
Nearly 25 percent said they find factual errors in news stories at least once a week. While 75 percent or so of adults were reported as skeptical about news accuracy, 25-30 percent of those with firsthand knowledge claimed they were misquoted or found errors in the news report.
And this part of the survey doesn't even include the nearly 50 percent who say they find misleading newspaper headlines more than once a week. Nor the 80 percent of respondents who feel newspapers overdramatize some news stories and the more than 75 percent who are concerned about the credibility of news stories that use anonymous sources.
The latter problem, of course, is not mainly an accuracy issue but more one of philosophy and policy.
This author's academic research on news accuracy-inaccuracy found the issue to be troubling but far more complex than at first impression. There are so-called objective errors (over obvious misprints and agreed-upon facts) and clearly over more subjective errors (including differences of opinion, interpretation).
In addition, besides any errors of commission, there are the ever-more troublesome problems of omission (what was left out and not printed). As in: what may happen after this column runs out of word choices and space.
David L. Grey, Ph.D. , is professor emeritus of journalism at San Jose State University where for 24 years he taught and did research on media law and ethics. He is a Mountain View resident.