The media needs to put up its hand when it gets things wrong

MY father learned all about mistakes at a wedding. Not his own wedding. He and my mother were guests, and to keep her end up, my mother borrowed a fur stole, described by its owner as “coney”.

Coney is the term for a dead rabbit trying to let on to be more important than it was in life. Not that my mother cared what it was called. It was fur and looked posh. She didn’t know, because she’d never previously worn fur of any kind, that rabbit sheds.

Rabbit sheds so much, you’d wonder why pet bunnies don’t have comb-overs. Rabbit sheds long hairs you can see, and shorter down hairs you can’t see. Within minutes of donning anything rabbit — sorry, coney — you find yourself in your very own snow-globe, surrounded by flying fibres.

The stole shed all over my father in the church and in the car taking the two of them to the hotel. Once he worked out what was causing the white hair coverage, he tried to keep my mother at arm’s length. This didn’t stop her shedding into the other guests’ soup, but it made it less obvious the shedder was with HIM.

Unfortunately, the effort to stay outside the circle of floating fur-hair constrained him somewhat. Keeping his elbows close to his ribs reduced his dexterity, causing his knife to slip on the plate carrying the main course. This slip shot half his petit pois up his sleeve so speedily that nobody noticed.

He sat there, his wife busily shedding beside him, and considered ushering the peas back out of his jacket, but decided against it, on the basis that funnelling peas in the middle of someone else’s wedding might make him look like a circus act manqué. Instead, he resolved to hold his left arm Napoleon style until he could get to somewhere like the gents, which allowed for expulsion of small green peas in privacy.

It was at this point he realised that the other wedding guests at his table were exchanging mind-you-I’ve-said-nothing glances. The cause was not his sleeve-full of vegetables, but the fact that my mother and himself had been heard referring to “derbiss,” this being their shared jokey version of “debris.” Sitting, lightly dusted down his right side in rabbit fur, his left arm protectively crooked around a sleeve-full of cooling peas, he realised that announcing to the assemblage that he really, really did know how to pronounce the synonym for “rubbish” was not going to work.

As a result of that wedding, he learned three things about mistakes. The first is that they often are rooted in the wearing of foreign finery. The second is that one mistake leads to another. The third is that some mistakes are difficult to apologise for.

Which is pretty much the thesis of Craig Silverman in Regret the Error, a new examination of mistakes made by mass media. Silverman, who runs a website gathering up such mistakes, believes that “…media mistakes are a threat to society, free speech, and the media itself”.

“The fact that journalism doesn’t put as much emphasis on error prevention and management as does the airline industry,” he says, “is one of the reasons why — even though accuracy is acknowledged as a fundamental of journalism — media errors are so commonplace.”

And commonplace they are, Irish media not excluded. (Although it’s pleasing, if misleading, that the cited examples of apologies to Conor Cruise O’Brien, Glenda Gilson and Máire Geoghegan-Quinn because of mistaken, inaccurate or just plain libellous reporting, are all drawn from overseas publications.)

Some newspaper errors don’t hurt anybody. They irritate readers, but don’t poke holes in a reputation.

One of the mistakes which — because of the nature of the recurring tragedy involved — pops up at least once a fortnight, particularly on Breaking News websites, is the one that says “Joe Bloggs was killed last night after two cars collided…” Joe Bloggs, Lord rest him, is not going to care. The impression left, nonetheless, is that he got not only got knocked down or collided with, either of which would have been bad enough, but that THEN some other unrelated malign force came along and killed him. Nothing as simple as him dying as a result of the collision, or being killed IN it.

Every committed newspaper reader, particularly if they’re of a certain age, has their own pet repeated mistake, whether it’s “disinterested” used where “uninterested” is what is meant, or “inferred” employed when what’s required is “implied”. Usage and punctuation parsing seems to be a function of advancing years. Acknowledging that trait without allowing it to drive less pernickety readers nuts is difficult.

Some newspaper errors are more fun in the correction than in the mistake itself. Fans of Britain’s Guardian newspaper tend to refer to it as “The Grauniad” in an in-joke along the lines of my father’s pronunciation of “debris.” The nickname comes from the newspaper’s level of typographical errors. The Guardian, for many years, has employed a Reader’s Editor, to whom enraged readers, spotting what they perceive to be an egregious error, can report. Ian Mayes, who held the job for many years, brought a dry humour to the correction of his colleagues’ mistakes which made the corrections section of the paper worth visiting, even if you had no interest in the bloomer being rectified.

Mistakes involving human beings are obviously much more serious than those involving words in vaccuo. Quite apart from bringing someone into disrepute by implying they are a) a slapper, b) a crook, c) take drugs, d) eat all the pies, newspapers now and again cause a stir by killing off someone who’s not actually dead.

The quintessential case featured 19th century wit Mark Twain, who notified the media, the day after they’d killed him off in print, that “rumours of my death are greatly exaggerated”. What gets lost in the telling of the Mark Twain story is the fact that he was an old, grieving man at the time of the error, having just been bereaved by the death of his beloved daughter, which makes the restraint and humour of his response all the more admirable. That’s the trouble with media mistakes, even when not intended to wound: they may happen at a time in someone’s life when they’re not well equipped to cope with the fallout from the mistake.

It’s not the immediate fallout that bothers me, but the half-life. More than a decade ago, a reporter did a huge story that libelled me 36 times. Although I didn’t sue, the other people involved in the story did sue, winning damages and apologies and acknowledgment from the newspaper that none of the story was true. The problem is that newspapers do not tend to remove from their websites or indicate, on their websites, the fact that a particular story is made up of old socks, and subsequent writers on the topic may retrieve and recycle the erroneous socks.

Silverman believes media websites should electronically remove or notify later readers that a libel was a libel.

It wouldn’t prevent recycling of the offence, but it would reduce the frequency.