Some corrections more embarrassing than others

Publishing corrections comes with the territory in this business. When you publish several thousand words every morning there’s bound to be a glitch or two.

This will shock you, but even I make mistakes. Really.

Such as when I wrote the other day about the hiring of David Trawin as the next CAO at city hall. I complimented the outgoing boss, Randy Diehl, for putting together a great administrative team, including Trawin, public works chief David Duckworth and parks guy Byron McCorkell.

Except, Randy didn’t hire McCorkell. Randy’s predecessor, Joe Martignago, points out this fact elsewhere on this blog.

“Keep up the good writing,” says Joe, “but, in the interest of ‘just the facts’… I’m afraid it’s me that must be held responsible for taking Byron out of the prairie wilderness and foisting him on Kamloops. (I also hired Randy, waay back when).”

You can read Joe’s full comments, but suffice to say I’m a little embarrassed.

About the time Joe’s message was landing in my inbox Tuesday, I was listening to As It Happens on the way home, in which host Jeff Douglas was talking about a correction that ran in the Washington Post last Friday.

“A March 15 Metro article about a priest who denied communion to a lesbian at her mother’s funeral was accompanied by a photo of a different woman who has the same name, Barbara Johnson,” stated the correction. “That photo is reprinted here, beneath a photo of the Barbara Johnson involved in the story.”

Saturday, the Post ran a second correction, which explained it had learned the first photo was not of anyone named Barbara Johnson at all but was of Sarah E. Reece, director of a national gay and lesbian task force.

So, the Post printed it for a third time, finally getting it right.

A couple of weeks ago, the Portland Oregonian had its own embarrassment. Its Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial page editor, Bob Caldwell, had died at 63.

The paper, based on what it was told by a family friend, said he was found dead in his car. It then published a correction explaining he had actually gone into cardiac arrest during a “sex act” in the apartment of a 23-year-old college student he had been buying textbooks for in return for certain favours.

Newspaper mistakes and corrections are great fodder for people who like to make fun of the media. They collect them; some even publish books or blogs about them.

One of my all-time favourites is this one: “A headline on an item in the Feb. 5 edition of the Enquirer-Bulletin incorrectly stated ‘Stolen groceries.’ It should have read ‘Homicide.’”

How about this? “Due to incorrect information received from the Clerk of Courts Office, Diane K. Merchant, 38, was incorrectly listed as being fined for prostitution in Wednesday’s paper. The charge should have been failure to stop at a railroad crossing.”

The editor of the Ottawa Citizen knew he was having a bad day when he wrote this one: “The Ottawa Citizen and Southam News wish to apologize for our apology to Mark Steyn, published Oct. 22. In correcting the incorrect statements about Mr. Steyn published Oct. 15, we incorrectly published the incorrect correction. We accept and regret that our original regrets were unacceptable and we apology to Mr. Steyne.”

We remain, ever at your service…