Monday, August 3, 2009
Media / News Bites When Newspapers Screw Up
Posted by Michael Miner on 08.03.09 at 06:38 PM
Every copy editor, when beginning on a new story turned in by a familiar writer, has a preconception of how well written it will be and, more to the point, how accurate. Mary McCarthy once said about Lillian Hellman, "Every word she writes is a lie, including and and the." If McCarthy had been Hellman's editor, for the sake of whoever paid them both she wouldn't have said a lie. She might have said carefree.
The editor's job is to whip a manuscript into such shape that there will be nothing to correct and nothing to apologize for, and with some of the more brilliant but carefree writers that's a good day's work, believe me. But it all stays in house. That's why "How Did This Happen?" the Sunday essay by the New York Times's public editor, Clark Hoyt, is such a shocker. He not only goes into unusual detail about how and why the Times botched its coverage of the death of Walter Cronkite, but he names a name:
The Times, he says, " had wrong dates for historic events; gave incorrect information about Cronkite’s work, his colleagues and his program’s ratings; misstated the name of a news agency, and misspelled the name of a satellite."
Why?
"The short answer is that a television critic with a history of errors wrote hastily and failed to double-check her work, and editors who should have been vigilant were not." A bit later Hoyt picks up this thread:
On June 19, Alessandra Stanley, a prolific writer much admired by editors for the intellectual heft of her coverage of television, wrote a sum-up of the Cronkite career, to be published after his death.
Stanley said she was writing another article on deadline at the same time and hurriedly produced the appraisal, sending it to her editor with the intention of fact-checking it later. She never did.
“This is my fault,” she said. “There are no excuses.”
In her haste, she said, she looked up the dates for two big stories that Cronkite covered — the assassination of Martin Luther King and the moment Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon — and copied them incorrectly. She wrote that Cronkite stormed the beaches on D-Day when he actually covered the invasion from a B-17 bomber. She never meant that literally, she said. “I didn’t reread it carefully enough to see people would think he was on the sands of Omaha Beach.”
What the Times now thinks about Stanley: "For all her skills as a critic, Stanley was the cause of so many corrections in 2005 that she was assigned a single copy editor responsible for checking her facts. Her error rate dropped precipitously and stayed down after the editor was promoted and the arrangement was discontinued. Until the Cronkite errors, she was not even in the top 20 among reporters and editors most responsible for corrections this year. Now, she has jumped to No. 4 and will again get special editing attention."
What Stanley now thinks about the paper that just hung her out to dry: I can only imagine.
There was much more to it than one careless writer, Hoyt makes clear. There was Alphonse and Gaston editing up and down the line, the result of a story that sat around for so many days that it always seemed safe to get to it tomorrow, and then, when Cronkite died July 17, had to be rushed into print.
But for all that Hoyt explained, there were issues he might have raised but didn't.
1. Even though the Times prefers making layoffs anywhere but in the newsroom, the newsroom hasn't gotten by unscathed? Are there fewer editors now, with the surviving editors feeling, by the Times's lofty standards, stretched?
2. Is the newsroom culture of excellence unruffled? Or has the new need for speed, the emphasis on putting stories up on line, eroded the value placed on precision at all costs?
In other words, are the Times's perfectionists fighting the same uphill battle that's going on at every other paper, which is to keep looking good while feeling lousy?
Comments (5)
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Copy editing is far and away the most misunderstood function on newspapers, even though it's quite basic. Almost without exception, at the newspapers I worked for, the most brilliant and capable people I knew--and I knew a wide range of folks in most of these venues--were copy editors. I found myself scratching my head and wondering: Why isn't THAT guy (or woman) the editor or managing editor? Why has he been stuck for 15 years on the rim? He brings a lot more zeal, passion, critical thinking, precision and sheer ability to his work than those dodos sitting in the glass offices.
I could say the same for a lot of reporters I knew, as well. But reporters do tend to advance more readily than copy editors--although, once again, those called to higher positions are usually the ones most skilled in office politics and almost never the folks you'd like to see in management.
Still, copy editors are sort of like the night-side cleanup crew. No one who matters knows them, and their work is seldom even noticed unless there's a screwup or, more likely (and here's the key point) they fix something in copy but, in so doing, somehow make the writer unhappy. Then all hell breaks loose. And usually the copy editor's justification for making the correction is insufficient defense if the reporter is UNHAPPY.
This in turn leads to very light-touch copy editing by intimidated rimmers (except those lions--God bless them--who are unfazed by repeated unjustified visits to the woodshed), and that invariably leads to more corrections in the paper. (This isn't to say that there aren't copy editors who overstep bounds and/or sort of sleep through their shifts. As with any other cubicle-type job, there's a wide range of abilities and attitudes, largely due to the fact that the nature of the work makes it difficult or impossible to fairly evaluate and those doing the evaluating have other things on their minds. Think Dilbert.)
I suspect that downsizing at the New York Times was a contributing factor in the embarrassing Cronkite obit. But don't discount the fear factor. Alessandra Stanley, despite her record there, might well be a star and a stylist, and stylist/stars tend to get mighty upset when their deathless prose is, as they see it, monkeyed with by a mere copy editor.
A sidenote: Over the years, as I got to know some of those corner-office dodos, I was astonished--repeatedly--by how few of them read their own papers, or even showed that much interest. At news meetings they tended to reveal a startling ignorance of what was in that day's paper, or even current events in general. You could tell they were leaning heavily on well-informed section editors and news editors to give them a kind of "executive fill." This is why, returning to the subject of the Times, I wasn't the least surprised to learn after the Judith Miller fiasco (this was several fiascos ago) that she had actually been taken off Iraq war coverage but then managed to "drift" back onto the beat, and even get several page 1 stories published. Someone with no familiarity with newsrooms must have been completely baffled by that. But it sounded quite familiar to me, given the consistently clueless performance I've seen at the highest levels elsewhere. The New York Times, in short, is badly edited--possibly exempting its diminishing crew of unintimidated copy editors. And the Times has lots of company.
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Absolutely downsizing is the reason. I have had a couple of features in the NY Times and the editing was beyond rigorous- my editor's questions had questions.
Wow, Pelham could work for the same paper as I do, because everything he/she says sounds exactly the same as my experience. I don't know about the NY Times exactly, but where I work we have a fraction of the number of copy editors we used to have. Editors are forced to trust the writers a lot more than we should. We never check names or web site addresses anymore, for example, unless they look suspicious. There just isn't time. And you do have preconceived notions about writers. I'll give one the benefit of the doubt but for another check on anything that seems a little off.
I do object to the Times naming names in its essay though. Saying a specific person has a history of errors is out of line in my opinion. Everyone in the office knows this person screws up a lot, but that's not for public consumption. At my paper there's always an awareness of not telling the public too much when you screw up. It reduces your credibility pointing out things like that. You have to make a correction when there's an error, but you say as little as possible and you don't belabor the point with a big, long essay on it.
It was already well known by the public that Stanley had a very high error rate. A few years ago, you will recall there was a major controversy when the newspaper originally refused to make a correction on something she wrote about Geraldo Rivera. Her long history of errors was widely discussed at the time on cable news shows and the internet. And it really would have been impossible, in my opinion, for the public editor to accuretely portray the issue involving this article without going into Stanley's history. Hoyt wouldn't be doing his job if he left something that important out of his essay.
In today's article about the debate over health care reform, I love the sentence "there is evidence of genuine public opposition to the Democrats' health plans." (fifth to last paragraph: http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/chi-tc-nw-health-dems-dog-0805-0aug06,0,3925334.story ) Ya think? With hundreds of millions of people in the country, the Tribune is able to discover that some people are genuinly opposed to a major policy proposal! I would suspect that a lack of quality copy editing might have contributed to that rather hilarious line.
