A single major error can damage a news organization. But incessant lesser ones can be more harmful. Like a cancer, they gradually destroy credibility and eventually sever the organization’s bond of trust with its audience.
Many readers say that’s happening with The Post….
It’s an industrywide problem. Teresa Schmedding, president of the American Copy Editors Society, predicts more burnout. “There’s only so long you can work in complete and utter chaos and keep your energy level up,” said Schmedding, who is with the Daily Herald in suburban Chicago.
Post ombudsman Andrew Alexander has written a devastating piece on the state of the modern media, “As errors grow, so does a credibility gap.”
Ever-shrinking newsrooms and increased pressure on surviving journalists are destroying two thirds of Joseph Pulitzer’s “standing order to his staff” of reporters: “ACCURACY. TERSENESS. ACCURACY.”
I’m going to excerpt this must read-piece at length because it contains an unintended irony that connects the growing number of small mistakes to the far larger and more dangerous mistakes the Post and the rest of the status quo media are now making on human-caused climate change:
… Many readers say that’s happening with The Post. This summer, and especially over the past month, there has been a spike in complaints about inexcusable “little” mistakes.The problem isn’t new. Two ombudsman columns in the past year have noted increased complaints that mostly involved typos and grammatical errors. But more recently, scores of readers have also complained about obvious factual errors that should have been easy to catch.
Last week, for instance, a Metro section story reported that a mother had “received a 30-day sentence” after being convicted of felony child-neglect. But readers were left scratching their heads because the caption with an accompanying photo of the woman erroneously said she received a suspended three-year sentence.
And there are other recent examples. Last weekend, a chart with a story about New Orleans put its metropolitan area population at 1.2 billion (instead of million). A Sunday Sports section story and photo caption said swimmer Michael Phelps had recently finished 11 seconds faster than his best time in an event (it was actually 11 seconds slower). Another story referred to the Veterans Administration, which was replaced by the Cabinet-level Department of Veterans Affairs more than two decades ago….
Readers care about accuracy. Even mistakes not related to facts, like improper grammar, erode their confidence in The Post’s journalism.”Small mistakes can often be a symptom of a larger problem,” wrote Trena Taylor of Cary, N.C., “and they diminish the prestige of the paper overall, and confidence in the individual articles.”
… Many readers raised that question recently over this front-page headline about the devastating floods in Pakistan: “For Pakistanis, the worse may be still to come.” The headline made it past about a half-dozen editors, including newsroom leaders who are e-mailed a front-page mock-up before deadline each night. No one detected that “worse” should be “worst,” even though the story’s third paragraph said “the worst may be still to come.”Anne Ferguson-Rohrer, a top Post production editor, blamed reduced staffing and the distraction of implementing a new and complex computerized content management system for producing The Post in print and online. Although not a factual mistake, the error proved embarrassing. “Clearly, it should have been caught,” she acknowledged.
What’s ironic is that the biggest mistake the Post made in the story is far more harmful to its readers than the headline, but Alexander never mentions it.
In this entire August 18 front-page piece about how Pakistan has been “staggered by the scale of destruction from this summer’s catastrophic floods” (as well as the 8/15 Post article it links to), the newspaper never mentions global warming or climate change. It never mentions that climate scientists have long been predicting that we would see more extreme deluges or even how one of the most basic facts of human-caused warming is, as Dr. Kevin Trenberth, head of the Climate Analysis Section at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, has explained to me (and any reporter who bothers to call him):
But there is a systematic influence on all of these weather events now-a-days because of the fact that there is this extra water vapor lurking around in the atmosphere than there used to be say 30 years ago. It’s about a 4% extra amount, it invigorates the storms, it provides plenty of moisture for these storms and it’s unfortunate that the public is not associating these with the fact that this is one manifestation of climate change. And the prospects are that these kinds of things will only get bigger and worse in the future.”
So the headline should read, “For Pakistanis and the whole world, the worst is still to come — because of human-caused climate change”
Indeed, many other newspapers whose reporting on the link between extreme deluges and human caused warming hasn’t been great (like the NYT and BBC) had already written pretty good stories on this topic by the time the Post had run their story:
- New York Times front-page story: In Weather Chaos, a Case for Global Warming! Trenberth: “It’s not the right question to ask if this storm or that storm is due to global warming, or is it natural variability. Nowadays, there’s always an element of both.” (8/15)
- Media wakes up to Hell and High Water: Moscow’s 1000-year heat wave and “Pakistan’s Katrina”: BBC, Reuters, USA Today, Time link warming and extreme weather; Trenberth, Stott, and Masters explain the science (8/12)
It’s not a big surprise, however, that Alexander misses the bark-beetle infested forest for the trees here (see The Post ombudsman whitewashes George Will’s columns, the editors, and his own role).
Alexander offers an explanation for why major newspapers like the Washington Post have become so error riddled — an explanation that suggests the problem is only going to get worse:
Reduced staffing because of summer vacations may be contributing to the problem. And installing the new system is surely a factor. But a prime cause of increased mistakes is The Post’s necessary cost-cutting that has resulted in far fewer people being pressed to do much more. The ranks of The Post’s full-time copy editors have been reduced by roughly half since 2005. Many who remain are among the best in the business. But even with the help of part-timers, their dramatically expanded online duties have stretched them thin.
It’s an industrywide problem. Teresa Schmedding, president of the American Copy Editors Society, predicts more burnout. “There’s only so long you can work in complete and utter chaos and keep your energy level up,” said Schmedding, who is with the Daily Herald in suburban Chicago.
There are few easy fixes. Reporters and other content originators can help by ensuring accuracy from the outset. But if this error-prone process is the new normal, it’s testing the loyalty of readers at a time when The Post desperately needs them.
“I love this paper,” said Tyson Ackermann of Anne Arundel County, who wrote to complain about mistakes in an online story. “But I have never seen such sloppiness.”
“I believe that The Post is one of the most important institutions of its time,” said Ackermann, adding that he is “fearful of a powerful voice in this country losing credibility.”
Uhh, that happened a long time ago, Mr. Ackermann (see And the 2009 “Citizen Kane” award for non-excellence in climate journalism goes to “¦).
On the fourth anniversary of Climate Progress, this Alexander piece is another reason new media trumps old media. Ironically, Alexander notes:
Many complaints involve mistakes online, where editing sometimes seems minimal. Several readers have said inaccurate information has remained even after they alerted writers or the Web site.
Mistakes are particularly likely online where there are fewer layers of editorial eyeballs and speed is of the essence. I am both the author of most CP posts and its editor, so if I don’t see a typo — or a homophone error from my voice dictation software — it’s going to slip through. But I get emails or comments within minutes and make corrections as fast as they are reported.
But if I had even a tiny fraction of the staff of the Washington Post, I would put in place a system that made the kind of errors they have incredibly rare. It is shameful that they don’t, but then, they appear to have fired most of their fact checkers a long time ago:
- The day DC journalism died: Washington Post is staffed with people who found ZERO mistakes in George Will’s error-filled denial column
- In a blunder reminiscent of Janet Cooke scandal, the Washington Post lets George Will reassert all his climate falsehoods plus some new ones
- The Washington Post, abandoning any journalistic standards, lets George Will publish a third time global warming lies debunked on its own pages
- Will the Washington Post ever fact check a George Will column?
- Memo to Post: If George Will quotes a lie, it’s still a lie
- Washington Post reporters take unprecedented step of contradicting columnist George Will in a news article
- WashPost recycles another denier WSJ op-ed, this time from coal apologist Bjorn Lomborg. Funny how two new senior Post editors came from the WSJ.
- Washington Post, Fred Hiatt turn op-ed page into a “joke” with yet another falsehood-filled piece attacking climate action and clean energy “” by GOP quitter-in-chief Sarah “Four Pinocchios” Palin!
- The Washington Post goes tabloid, publishes second falsehood-filled op-ed by Sarah Palin in five months “” on climate science and the hacked emails!
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Joe, you have done an excellent job of monitoring bad and corrupt information about climate change in the media, but you have a lot on your plate. The Post ombudsman reported what’s going on there.
Why isn’t there an organized and comprehensive effort to fact check all of the media on this subject, and especially to call them on bringing in “balance” in the form of bullshit from people like Watts and Lindzen?
It’s extremely important that this job be done on an ongoing basis. Can CAP fund it? I nominate Russ Gelbspan.
Two decades ago I attended an early TED conference in which W.R.Hearst III talked about the emerging digital media threat to print media. The threat: online media didn’t generate as much revenue.
For years before and since I’ve heard print media complain that readers refuse to pay to read online media…and that this is the primary cause of declining profits.
However what I learned from Hearst at the TED talk was that the money readers paid to buy a print newspaper did not even cover the cost of producing that physical newspaper. The newsprint and printing and delivery costs were more than the sales price. Creating printed media was a loss leader paid for by ad revenues to get the media into the hands of readers. All the money for the reporting came from ads.
I’ve had this re-confirmed in discussions with other media folks at top newspapers. The fact that online media is free to read is not the cause of the drop in profits used to fund reporting.
The real problem seems to be that advertisers can better track what they are getting for their ad dollar in the online world. It is this more efficient marketplace that has ad revenues down. In many ways it was an artificial marketplace based in lack of transparency and data that inflated ad rates in the past. That is model is not going to come back.
Clearly traditional print media has a profit model problem now. And there are many good things a big newspaper can bring to media. Two unique things they have offered are
1) ability to cover broad range of issues in-depth around the globe
2) trust that they are reporting the news accurately
Now there is online media covering just about everyting in far greater detail than even the biggest single traditional media source can offer. Climate Progress is an amazing example. Thank you Joe.
If the traditional print media continue to lose trust through inaccurate and incomplete coverage, they are in deep trouble.
It is a miserable bind to be so much more dependent on advertisers than ever before. It pushes marketting decisions more into the driver’s seat in terms of what is covered and how it is reported. Climate coverage is the poster child of this silencing so as not to ruffle the remaining flightly golden geese. Just look at the number of ads for high-fossil-fuel consuming items fill traditional media. Cars and worldwide jet Travel have their own sections even.
Other institutions, like top universities, have figured out how to take core values and survive and thrive on the support of their communities who care about these core values. Time for a re-think while there is still core values to rally around.
This is certainly an industrywide problem for journalism, due to the severe staff cutbacks.
And you’re right that support systems, like well-designed computer software, can reduce errors, at least the grammatical errors, to a substantial degree. (I wonder about the quality of that new system the Post just put in place. Will it, for example, properly replace pairs of single quotation marks at the beginning of a sentence with the double-quote? I still see this in online text pasted from newspaper copy, although such doubled characters seem to be caught at the end of sentences.)
More importantly, I wonder if this increasing sloppiness may be an economy-wide problem caused by management pushing less and less staff to do more and more, and by the extreme emphasis on multitasking. Recent studies, and books like Maggie Jackson’s Distracted, point out how this can become counterproductive.
My son, 20 years old, does not use traditional media at all. I asked him about the traditional media (radio, TV, newspapers) and he indicated that no one uses them for info.
He uses media that is Internet based and usually social network based (Facebook, Youtube, Twitter, texting and the like).
There is a distinct possibility that important info on Climate, warming and the War on CO2 will be lost among the noise of the daily info generated by his peers.
I asked him about the generation coming after him, the 12-15 year olds and he indicated that from his perspective they were on their own planet…. even more detached from what we older folks call ‘traditional media’.
Do I see a problem here? Yes.
Have I the faintest idea how to solve it? No.
Mike: So you’re saying we should start a group of Citizen Editors?
(Sorry, I couldn’t resist. And for those who don’t get the inside baseball joke, many of the deniers who hound climate scientists over their work call themselves “citizen auditors”.)
In all seriousness, I love the idea, kind of a climate version of Media Matters. And Ross Gelbspan would be an outstanding pick to run it. I exchanged e-mail with Ross some time back, and will drop him a line about it.
The issue seems to be advertisers yanking the chain of old media. I’ve seen comments on CP in the recent past that claimed CNN (or MSNBC?) called some extreme weather events examples of global warming. They were informed that advertisers would cancel.
As long as old media relies upon fortunes that were made in 19th Century energy – fossil fuels, they’ll be stuck maintaining a status quo that is dragging civilization to its doom.
It’s reminiscent of big business under the Nazi’s. Little capitulations resulted in massive corruption. There is an ominous calm before the storm feeling that resembles the months before World War II. Everyone knew war was likely but felt powerless or turned a blind eye.
Thanks Joe. There is a “forest for the trees” kind of irony here. Even if they’d dotted all their “i’” and crossed all their “t’s,” they would still be guilty of gross negligence by both omission and commission.
Errors of omission include not mentioning the now obvious link between climate-related disasters and climate change.
But it may be their errors of commission that are most egregious. Publishing Sarah Palin’s empty headed ruminations on energy and climate; publishing George Will’s outright lies about same; giving credence to sophists like Lomborg are a few examples. Equally bad is the fact that they make every news story a he-said, she-said exchange, giving the few known contrarians with little or no scientific background equal billing with the many well informed scientists actively researching climate change in an attempt to achieve “balance” as if science were a popularity contest, or a compromise between what we see and what we wish were so.
Even if every article is typo free and grammaticaly perfect, they will still be losing the trust of their readers, for as long as they screw up like this.
Good post!
Joe you should start a mirror site on Facebook. Seriously. #4 Gord is right.. Young generations have moved on to more interactive media.
I have started a Facebook portal were I link to many of your excellent post, but it needs to get more younger audience.
http://www.facebook.com/pages/Climate-Portals/139434822741700?ref=ts
I think if you had an official one u would get a large younger audience.
Sarah Palin, George Wills and Ann Coulter. The Washington Post is targeted at more conservative readers and it’s not for me.
This post confuses the issues rather than clarifies. Perhaps there are more typos and billions instead of millions because there are too few copy editors. Correcting these sorts of things is the copy editor’s job. But the issue we’ve been facing is caused by the willful ignorance of the writers and editors, individuals much higher on the editorial food chain than a copy editor.
It takes so little time to report on climate change. The issues are actually about as simple as they get. “Oh, I am so busy!” is not an excuse.
I wonder about the quality of that new system the Post just put in place. Will it, for example, properly replace pairs of single quotation marks at the beginning o(I wonder about the quality of that new system the Post just put in place. Will it, for example, properly replace pairs of single quotation marks at the beginning of a sentence with the double-quote?
“Many readers say that’s happening with The Post….”
In reality, this happened with The Post a long time ago. There was a rapid deterioriation in editorial standards and fact-checking in the run-up to the 2003 Iraq invasion. I canceled my morning delivery when they started running front-page pieces that didn’t quote a single named source. In other words, there was no proof that they weren’t simply making things up. That last phrase sounds like a lot of Joe’s complaints about The Post.
Second verse, same as the first.