So the story below runs a little something like this: The NYTimes ombudsman (Public Editor) is asked to look into a problem with the Walter Cronkite obituaries that ran in the paper, obits that turned out to be pretty riddled with errors.
The public editor asks: How did this happen? But in asking that question, he came up with a lot of technical answers, while still avoiding the elephant in the room (or rather, missing from the room, the way so many reporters, copyeditors, etc. are now missing from newsrooms across the country).
THE TIMES published an especially embarrassing correction on July 22, fixing seven errors in a single article — an appraisal of Walter Cronkite, the CBS anchorman famed for his meticulous reporting. The newspaper 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.
“Wow,” said Arthur Cooper, a reader from Manhattan. “How did this happen?”
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.
But a more nuanced answer is that even a newspaper like The Times, with layers of editing to ensure accuracy, can go off the rails when communication is poor, individuals do not bear down hard enough, and they make assumptions about what others have done. Five editors read the article at different times, but none subjected it to rigorous fact-checking, even after catching two other errors in it. And three editors combined to cause one of the errors themselves.
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We're losing the forest for the trees here. I actually feel sorry for the journalist, at least as she emerges in this story (and I've heard other folks speak up on her behalf on Twitter as a very talented person). I know very little about her, but I feel like I have a sense of her in my mind's eye, because I've worked in newsrooms with others I would describe in the same way she is described in this story.
Yes, she's gotten some great bylines at the most incredible newspaper in the country. She's got a wonderful career that many out-of-work veteran journalists would give their eye-teeth for (and yes, I know many of those out-of-work vets are probably male, cuz it is far easier to pick on error-prone journalists if they are women... the cultural sexist baggage kicks in, just another variation of the same idiotic crap that was spouted in the Senate hearings of Judge Sotomayor, and just as wrong).
So don't lump me in with THAT crowd, as I am not piling on that narrow-minded bandwagon. Doors of opportunity have to open somehow, and there's nothing worse than feeling certain spaces (like prominent journalism jobs) are so exclusive and elite, the only non-smarmy-prep-school-buddy types who get jobs in those places got in with the same odds as winning the lottery.
I know people who work at the New York Times, and I know that is not true. Or that it is and it isn't, because my friends are not smarmy-prep-school-types and they didn't win the lottery, or maybe they did, but it's a pretty easy lottery. (My jury is out on that score, because I've inadvertently won some lower-level lotteries myself, at least in my own mind)
BUT BY THE SAME TOKEN... I am also owning up to having worked with some ridiculously inexperienced and/or bad journalists, people of both genders, in newsrooms which I thought were better than that.
It's one thing to work with and mentor interns and entry-level folks. It's another thing when people without much journalism experience are promoted REALLY quickly and seem to have an effortless rise to newsroom gatekeeper roles or plumb assignments. It does leave one gasping, especially in an environ of almost constant layoffs of newsroom veterans (who generally happen to have been around long enough to have gotten into more expensive pay grades), not just for the loss of beat knowledge over time, but even knowledge of basic things, like knowing the capitals of states and countries, or times of moon landings, or having enough knowledge of WWII events to place a reporter in the correct setting.
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What Sam Sifton, the culture editor, ruefully called “a disaster, the equivalent of a car crash,” started nearly a month before Cronkite died, when news began circulating that he was gravely ill. 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.”
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I don't really want to beat this dead horse (I've made my share of embarrassing fact errors in my day, although never so many in ONE STORY), because they've been coming for the reporters and photographers and copyeditors and wire editors, and for folks in the Morgue, evidently, for 20+ years now, all over the country, and the elite papers have said nothing.
It appears now that the pink slips have invaded all aspects of journalism, to the point that newsrooms are minefields of folks who need to be assigned a "special" editor just to copyedit and fact-check for them (could this be a potential contract opportunity for laid off veteran reporters? Can they come in and follow behind your underpaid and overworked staff to keep them from embarrassing themselves with fact errors?).
I don't mean to pick on the young, as there are some seriously gifted young people in the talent pool (and I am a big fan of one in particular at the Times whose blogging as a college student greatly affected my life for the better), but they often aren't the folks who glide to those inexplicably quick promotions by management and its unique take on the Peter Principle (I'm speaking across the field in general here, not of the Times newsroom in particular), and sometimes end up so far out of their depth.
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.
So yeah, I'd bet I'm not the only one who has ever watched some writer/reporter (or writer/producer in TV newsrooms) too-quickly promoted up while veteran reporters were being laid off or moved sideways and out. And I've watched people in the newsroom, whole teams sometimes, forced to cover for them, to get the show or paper out on schedule without deep embarrassments, or worse.
Generally, I just figured some "Daddy" somewhere bought them their glamorous jobs. Maybe trust fund-subsidized journalism jobs are the new "vanity publishing" of the 2000s.
For all the talented and solid journalists that are laid off, you ever wonder why some people, when they screw up, get special "minders" instead? For all you folks working your way up from smaller town or metro papers, building up your chops, did you have any idea that at the special papers you were working your way up to by being as perfect as you could be, there were some people at those elite papers who were so sloppy, they got special dedicated copy editors?
Yeah, I didn't really BELIEVE it was a meritocracy either. I said that at the top of this post. More like winning the lottery, how you end up on those amazing jobs.
And from my years as a college writing teacher, I will also vouch for an across-the-board decline in depth of general reading and literacy skills, a blind-spot that reached into my honors courses as much as it did the regular classes, because it was a blindness of peer-socialization, a lack of reading, a television secondary orality culture. That factor alone may be mostly responsible for most of the errors we see making it into print and other mass media these days. The cultural amnesia that rides along with it.
That and copyeditors are being cut now, cut deeply, to the point that it doesn't just hurt, because the whole system is breaking down.
When even the pre-written Morgue obit copy is affected, you know you have an endemic problem.
How ironic, that the iconic exemplar of the short-sightedness of newsroom cutbacks (and the blaming of the over-worked and inexperienced staff for it) had to occur with the obituary for Walter Cronkite, someone who was forced out of his anchor's chair far too early, and for all the wrong reasons.
Not that very many of the obit writers and TV commentators in 2009 were old enough to remember that.
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