Ombudsman: On Corrections

Correction Appended

Newspapers hate admitting when they’re wrong.

Sure, they’ll run a box on Page 2 dutifully reporting a misspelled last name or a wrong address, but what if you insist that the newspaper correct a broad mischaracterization of you or your organization? Nah, you just don’t like our angle.

Often, every fact in a story will be “true,” but at least to some readers, the end result isn’t. The trouble here is the “to some readers” part—the truth eventually gets pretty subjective.

That’s why the directness with which The Crimson corrected a problematic story last week was surprising and indeed heartening.

On April 12, Fifteen Minutes (FM), The Crimson’s weekly magazine, ran a cover story about a group of undergraduate student organizations that were facing financial hardship because of the somewhat unwieldy way Harvard doles out student activity funds. Problem was, at least one of those groups, the quarterly magazine Diversity and Distinction, wasn’t currently facing financial hardship. They hadn’t been for as long as anyone currently in the College has been here. Yet, except for one point where the article says the magazine went into greater debt with each issue it published, no sentence can truly be called outright false. The writer never says Diversity and Distinction is facing financial hardship. The trouble with the article arose because the magazine was in financial straits several years ago. The article discussed this period without ever making it clear the magazine has since righted itself.

When I spoke with the article’s editors and writer a few days after the story ran, they were fairly defensive, adopting the posture that the article’s critics just misunderstood its point.

“I think they thought it was going to be a story of them overcoming adversity. That was never the angle,” said Aria S.K. Laskin ’08, one of FM’s co-chairs.

By the time a correction ran on April 16, however, the editors had apparently come around. In addition to correcting what were clear factual errors, the 197-word “Editor’s Note” admitted that the article had unfairly portrayed Diversity and Distinction as a tottering group when it apparently is nothing of the sort.

Crimson Managing Editor Javier C. Hernandez ’08 said he thinks the paper would have run the same correction even if I hadn’t been planning on writing about the incident. The Crimson appears to be fairly responsible about owning up to its mistakes. It publishes one or two corrections most days, generally on more trivial issues.

But it also publishes a handful of “Editor’s Notes” each year. In February, the paper ran an Editor’s Note on the editorial page explaining that an alumnus supposedly quoted in an article about the beauty of Sever Hall had not actually been interviewed for the story. An apparent imposter gave the reporter a false name. Last November a lengthy note ran about a columnist and editorial cartoonist who had both improperly borrowed material from others. [see correction below]

It may be premature, though, to say The Crimson does as good a job as it should.

Frankie Chen ’07, the co-editor-in-chief of Diversity and Distinction, said The Crimson’s reputation has been to be fairly diffident to criticism. Chen said colleagues he discussed the published correction with were surprised by its directness.

“They were surprised The Crimson would do anything and do something so classy,” Chen said.

Which is not to say Chen feels like his magazine has been left untarnished by the incident. He’s rightly worried that advertisers who read the original article, but not the correction, would be reluctant to continue supporting a magazine that’s apparently on the edge of collapse. Similarly, he fears the article could make recruiting staff hard.

The article, like everything these days, will probably linger forever on the Internet. The original remains on the Crimson Web site, although with prominent notices that the article has been corrected.

Chen had originally wanted The Crimson to remove the article from the site, but he said he was persuaded by Crimson editors that doing so would tamper with the historical record of what actually appeared in the newspaper.

No matter how quickly and plainly newspapers correct their errors, the damage they cause will rarely be wholly undone. In the earlier stages of the Internet age, some worried that the Internet would leave little historical record, but the opposite appears to be true. Google and YouTube seem to guarantee that our mistakes will never die, and will, in fact, reach an ever broader audience.

Several forces seem to be driving newspapers toward more accountability and transparency: the New York Times-Jayson Blair scandal, the ombudsman industry, and the growth of Internet media including a phalanx of bloggers and watchdogs focused largely on the foibles of the old media.

It would be unfortunate if all this criticism enfeebled newspapers, but there’s a difference between fearlessness and recklessness.

I’d like to hear more from readers about your past—and undoubtedly future—experiences about trying to get The Crimson to correct itself. Email me at ombudsman@thecrimson.com and I’ll report on the reader consensus in a future column.

Michael Kolber is The Crimson’s ombudsman and a Harvard Law School student. He writes a monthly column, responding to reader complaints with his independent critiques of The Crimson. This is his second column.

Correction: Due to an production error, yesterday's ombudsman column "On Corrections" stated that: "In February, the paper ran an Editor’s Note on the editorial page explaining that an alumnus supposedly quoted in an article about the beauty of Sever Hall had not actually been interviewed for the story. An apparent imposter gave the reporter a false name. Last November a lengthy note ran about a columnist and editorial cartoonist who had both improperly borrowed material from others." In fact, the February editor's note ran in the news section and the November note ran on the editorial page. The Crimson regrets the error.