Corrections We Have Known
The demise of print journalism has killed off the best part of local newspapers: The Corrections Section
Recent media research has indicated an alarming decline of daily community newspapers. According to research, the industry is in the dumpster, the dumpster is on fire and the rescue workers have been equipped with nitroglycerine and dynamite.
This is a bitter pill to swallow. Worse yet, with fewer newspapers and reporters, there are fewer stories with errors that need corrections. And so we are also losing what has always been my favorite sections of newspapers: The Corrections.
I am a recovering community journalist, which means I’ve long savored reading newspaper corrections. The Corrections section exists so that newspapers can publicly admit that they’ve employed a nitwit reporter who screwed something up in a story they’ve published. Seeing a correction for which I wasn’t personally responsible was a wholly validating experience. I loved reading other reporters’ corrections because they were reminders that I wasn’t the only nitwit in the profession.
Confession: I have written my share of corrections. For a time at The Monterey County Herald, reporters who somehow botched up a story or got some fact wrong were required to write their own corrections. Editors thought of this humbling exercise as punishment or something. The idea was like, “Okay, dumbass, you screwed up this thing and made the entire crew at the newspaper look like a bunch of dumbasses, so you get to correct your dumbass error.”
I actually became a half-decent corrections writer. Some would say it was my specialty.
Honestly, though, when done correctly newspaper corrections can be a thing of beauty. They can be a distinct form of poetry, an artful crafting of concise words that conjure a message of guilt and contrition. Corrections are often downright hilarious, even as the reader is left to imagine the potentially horrifying consequences of a newspaper’s dumbassed screwup.
For instance, consider the mea culpa the Watsonville Register-Pajaronian published on March 21, 1986. The R-P’s concise and self-aware correction is my all-time favorite. It would qualify for a Pulitzer Prize, if only the Pulitzer committee rewarded perfect corrections.
Sometimes, for miserable everyday citizens of the world, a newspaper can manage to make their unspeakably hapless conditions even worse when it botches up a routine story. And there’s nothing worse than botching up a child’s obituary.
Not to seem insensitive, but can you imagine the conversation that must have taken place between the editor of the Salinas Index and a hapless everyday citizen named Mr. Floyd Stewart that resulted in this elegiac correction on Jan. 28, 1927?:
Back before a journalism degree was required of reporters working in a newsroom, any slobbering inebriate with fingers functional enough to type out a newspaper story could see their masterpiece published in that day’s edition.
Those were the good old days, when America was great and a person didn’t need to go to an elite university to learn how to properly gather facts and to arrange those facts in a sensible story that an average 12-year-old might comprehend.
As you might imagine, those old-timey newspaper stories were often fraught with erroneous details, and sometimes those “bad facts” made a complete mockery of the human experience, writ large in the morning paper with headlines and narratives that needlessly, carelessly and callously launched a cavalcade of rumors and gossip that destroyed the lives of perfectly good (if not miserable) people.
It was also a practice among some publications back then to allow the victims of a newspaper’s libelous screwup to correct the record themselves, in their own words. And sometimes the victim-written corrections were pure works of satisfying pathos. This particular example is taken from the Nov. 14, 1900, edition of the Santa Cruz Evening Sentinel:
Of course, publishing a reader’s correction to an allegedly incorrect story is no guarantee that the truth has been settled. In fact, allowing a reader to “correct the record” is more likely tantamount to “opening a can of worms.”
Because let’s face it, the reader who feels victimized by a newspaper’s “error” might simply be angry that his life event was so miserable that an account of his misery somehow made its way into print, made public for all the world to see. Or he might have a personal axe to grind. Or he could have a hidden agenda. Or — and this is also very possible, believe me — he might be out of his ever-loving freaking mind. Such persons will often declare the news story a complete fabrication and demand a correction.
For instance, in the example above, doesn’t it seem suspicious that A.R. Arano’s dad left the house on account of ill health but never returned? And what was the nature of the debilitating sickness that kept him gone for so long? Rabies? St. Vitus Dance? The Heebie-Jeebies? And what sort of operation killed mother?
If A.R. Arano was so intent on un-tarnishing the family name, you’d think he’d do a better job of explaining things.
Because, let’s face it, statements should be verified before printing. That is the essence of journalism. Everybody knows that. The late Mrs. E.R. Carter, formerly of Monterey, knew that as well as anyone, as she stated in the Monterey Daily Cypress on July 25, 1919, edition of the Monterey Daily Cypress:
Finally, Mr. Joseph Rhyner was none too happy on May 18, 1901, when he opened up the Salinas Californian, his daily newspaper, to read the news that his mother was still alive.
Very timely.