December 06, 2004

BBC hoaxed

Bbc_1BBC TV and Radio fell victim to a hoaxer last week. A man who said his name was Jude Finisterra and claimed to be a spokesman for Dow Chemical went on the air at the Beeb and said Dow was taking full responsibility for the 1984 Bhopal disaster, and had set up a $12 billion fund to compensate  victim's families and survivors. Here's how the BBC described the Bhopal incident, "Thousands were killed instantly on December 3, 1984 when the Union Carbide plant in Bhopal released 40 tonnes of lethal methyl isocyanate gas into the air, in one of the world's worst environmental disasters."

The BBC has since apologized on air for getting taken and also published a "Note" on its website. The BBC publishes both Notes and corrections. Notes are for things of a more serious matter or that require more clarification. This Note quotes BBC World saying it was the victim of "an elaborate deception" that led to the phony interview. Yes Men, the group behind this and other hoaxes, has published their own account of how it was pulled off. It seems their "elaborate" hoax consisted of them responding to an email and sending someone in a suit to a television studio...

Here's the BBC World apology:

This morning at 9am and 10am (GMT) BBC World ran an interview with someone purporting to be from the Dow chemical company about Bhopal.
This interview was inaccurate, part of an elaborate deception.
The person did not represent the company and we want to make it clear that the information he gave was entirely inaccurate.

And here's the BBC Radio apology:

Earlier this morning, our news bulletin here (on Radio 2/4/5 Live) carried an extract from an interview with someone purporting to be from the Dow chemical company about the disaster twenty years ago at Bhopal in India.
It is now clear that the person did not, in fact, represent the Dow company and we want to make clear that the information he gave was entirely inaccurate. 

December 06, 2004 at 10:58 AM | Permalink

December 01, 2004

Another Canuck scribe in trouble for plagiarism

Ottawa_citizen_2Splayed across roughly over half of the opinion page in yesterday's Ottawa Citizen is a 1,514-word article in which veteran journalist Robert Sibley admits to several instances where he used the words of others without proper attribution. The piece is thoroughly apologetic and itemizes each instance. It follows on the heels of the firing of Elizabeth Nickson from the National Post over a similar offense. Sibley, who was on the paper's Editorial Board, has now been "reassigned" within the Citizen.

The article begins, "After 25 years in journalism as a reporter, editor, feature writer, essayist, columnist and editorial writer, it is with deep regret that I inform colleagues and readers of mistakes of attribution in some of my recent work."

This apology and correction is rare primarily because it is written by the offender and not by the editors of the paper. It is also rare in that a repeat offender was not fired.

This article, while sincere, unquestionably apologetic, and heartbreaking to read, does fall short in one critical area: it does not tell us how the errors were discovered and how the paper is certain there were no other instances. As far as the reader knows, Sibley just spontaneously decided to fess up. Did the paper install anti-plagiarism software? Did a reader -- or one of the people Sibley failed to credit -- complain?

In situations such as this, it is better to over-explain.  Readers who feel they have not had all their questions answered will likely assume that the paper is trying to cover something up. Sibley's apology should have been accompanied by a note from the editors explaining how the errors were discovered and what has been done to improve their anti-plagiarism measures.

Back to the errors...The article lists eight times Sibley did not properly attribute the work of others. His explanation was this:

Firstly, I lost control of my material. Whether I write an editorial or a large series, I do as much background research and information gathering as time allows and necessity dictates. The more complex the article or story, the more research. The risk in this effort is being inundated with too much information, some of which is easily recalled, some of which isn't and some of which becomes part of me in the sense that, like anyone else, I absorb some of what I learn. For example, I don't recall reading Anderson's "Pilgrimage to the Stars" article, although it is obvious I must have. I presume (in hindsight) that her sentence got lost in the large amount of historical material I gathered in preparing to write my 50,000-word series. I was careless.

Secondly, in the references to Scruton, Zakaria, Feldman and Nagel, I didn't sufficiently distinguish my primary and secondary sources. For instance, Nagel offers a summary of Descartes' thought that is familiar to me. I surmise (again, in hindsight) that I incorporated his words in my initial draft and then did not think to question something I "knew" when I did the final draft sometime later.

Read the specific errors and other parts of the article by following the link below, as the article is not available on the Citizen's website.

Sibley's mistakes:

In an Aug. 22, 2004 column, "Nothing Stands Still: Advance reading offsets romantic images of Japan," I referred to Nakahama Manjiro, a Japanese fisherman rescued after a shipwreck in 1841, writing that "He was picked up by an American whaling boat, given the name 'John Man,' and taken to the United States." That sentence came from a previously published article by Stephen Rowe in the Japanese online magazine Metropolis.

In an editorial, "Hating the U.S.," published March 18, 2004, I wrote: "America is unloved in the alleys of Amman, despised in the cafes of Paris and sneered at in the souks of Istanbul." The sentence was inspired by Fouad Ajami's July 3, 2003 article "The anti-Americans" in The Wall Street Journal in which he wrote: "America is unloved in the alleyways of Nablus and Karachi, and in the cafes of Paris." I thought it reasonable to "improve" on Ajami's image for my own purposes, but it is arguable that I should have credited him with the idea.

On Jan. 6, 2004, my column about a NASA Mars mission, "That's the Spirit," contained the phrase "a golf-cart sized dinner tray on wheels" to describe the Martian geological explorer. That phrase, with only a slight variation, appeared in a Jan. 5 article by Mark Sappenfield in The Christian Science Monitor.

In an essay entitled "For Freedom of others," published on Sept. 7, 2003, I discussed two books -- Fareed Zakaria's The Future of Freedom: Illiberal Democracy at Home and Abroad, and Noah Feldman's After Jihad: America and the Struggle for Islamic Democracy. I wrote: "The Iranian parliament -- elected more freely than most in the Middle East -- imposes harsh restrictions on speech and even dress." In a 1997 essay, "The Rise of Illiberal Democracy," published in Foreign Affairs, Zakaria wrote: "The Iranian parliament -- elected more freely than most in the Middle East -- imposes harsh restrictions on speech, assembly, and even dress, diminishing that country's already meager supply of liberty." Similarly, in summarizing Feldman's book, I wrote: "Indeed, according Feldman, a law professor with a doctorate in Islamic Thought, mainstream Islamists don't want jihad, they want democracy." While the phrase "mainstream Islamists don't want jihad, they want democracy" reflects Feldman's views, I should have attributed the phrase to Martin Kramer, who discussed Feldman's book on his weblog.

In an editorial entitled "Free to help and to preach," published on May 27, 2003, I cited the English political theorist Roger Scruton's book The West and the Rest to explain the concept of the separation of church and state. Unfortunately, I wrote a sentence that while intended to convey Scruton's thought was almost identical to one written by political scientist Paul Meilaender in a review of Scruton's book that appeared in the March 2003 edition of First Things. Mr. Meilaender wrote: "... Scruton claims that the defining achievement of the West has been to resolve the 'contest between religion and politics' by conceiving of the state as an independent source of human authority, deriving its legitimacy not from divine commands, but from the will of the citizens whom it represents." I dropped the phrase "Scruton claims," assuming that since I subsequently quoted Scruton within the paragraph in which the sentence occurs, my attribution would be clear.

In a Feb. 2, 2003 column, "The dangers of space can't stop the explorer," I cited Albert Harrison's book Spacefaring: The Human Dimension, but also used a sentence that varies only slightly from Amazon.com's description of Harrison's book. I wrote, "Indeed, the stars have always called us, but only in the past four decades have we been able to respond." The Amazon.com "product description" reads: "The stars have always called us, but only for the past forty years or so have we been able to respond by travelling in space."

On Dec. 29, 2002, in a column on philosophers' biographies entitled "Looking at the lives behind the earth-shaking thoughts," I incorporated material from Thomas Nagel's review of Rudiger Safranski's Nietzsche: A Philosophical Biography, which ran in The New Republic on Jan. 24, 2002. Nagel referred to Rene Descartes as having "believed that by doubting everything he had learned in an ordinary way he would find within himself an unassailable form of thought that would allow him to reconstruct his knowledge of both himself and the world on a secure foundation." I used most of that sentence in a paragraph summarizing Richard Watson's biography, Cogito Ergo Sum: The Life of Rene Descartes.

Finally, on Nov. 12, 2000, I included a 23-word sentence in the second part of my nine-part series on the Camino de Santiago pilgrimage that should have been attributed to an article entitled "Pilgrimage to the Stars" by Mary Jo Anderson that appeared in the February 2000 edition of the Catholic magazine, Crisis. Her sentence reads: "As the pilgrims streamed across Europe, converging on the 'Road of Stars,' they exchanged ideas about architecture, fashion, ballads, politics, food and philosophy." I wrote: "As the pilgrims trekked across Europe, converging on the Road of Stars, they exchanged ideas about architecture, fashion, science, politics, food and philosophy."

More from sibley on the errors:

In journalism, it is not always necessary to attribute well-known or widely available historical material, generic descriptions or statements of fact. It is also generally permitted to use ideas that fall under the categories of "fair use" and "public domain." As Richard Posner, an American jurist and a lecturer at the University of Chicago Law School, wrote in a Newsday article on May 18, 2003: "Another phrase for copying an idea, as distinct from the form in which it is expressed, is dissemination of ideas. If one needs a license to repeat another person's idea, or if one risks ostracism by one's professional community for failing to credit an idea to its originator, who may be forgotten or unknown, the dissemination of ideas is impeded."

...That said, I am responsible for what I did. My errors may have been, in part at least, the consequence of gathering or trying to impart too much information; to be sure, I like to think my essays, columns and editorials bring to the reader's attention ideas that can help them better understand the world. Nevertheless, while I was not intentionally trying to appropriate the words or ideas of others as my own, I must acknowledge my failures in attribution. And it is for this that I wholeheartedly apologize -- to the authors whose words I used, to my colleagues and, most particularly, to Citizen readers, who have every right to expect better of me.

December 01, 2004 at 02:55 PM | Permalink

November 25, 2004

Another National Post columnist in hot water; Free Press columnist resigns

Nationalpost_1_1Canada's National Post, which recently fired a columnist over charges of plagiarism, published an apology yesterday after a columnist insinuated something rather nasty about Canada's Governor General. UPDATE: We previously published the nature of the allegation, but were rightly smacked upside the head by Antonia Zerbisias at The Toronto Star. It's untrue and hurtful and shouldn't have been repeated. We regret the error. Here's the Post's apology from Wednesday's A2:

"In the first item in a column by Gillian Cosgrove in this paper on Monday, November 22, 2004, a number of fundamental errors and intentional misrepresentations appeared. The editors regret this and apologize to all concerned."

The CBC has a good story that provides all the background this ambiguous apology doesn't. Antonia Zerbisias at The Toronto Star also chimes in and speaks with the GG's lawyer who says that, "The matter is ended." Honestly, we think they're letting the Post get off easy with this one. Why is The Post so unwilling to explain what these "fundamental errors and intentional misrepresentations" were? And why, according to the CBC, have they expunged the column in question from their database without explanation? (The link to the column on their site says, "This story is no longer available," though Zerbisias poins out that the story is still in the Factiva database.) Let's see if the Editor-In-Chief of The Post, Matthew Fraser, grants interviews about this incident (he didn't over the Nickson affair and didn't respond to the CBC yesterday).

It seems to us that a column containing  "fundamental errors and intentional misrepresentations" (emphasis ours) deserves much more of an explanation. What were the fundamental errors? What was the intent? This apology does not cut the mustard and we hope more detail is on the way from The Post.

--

Wfp_logoIn an unrelated story, Scott Taylor, a long time sports columnist at The Winnipeg Free Press, resigned after the paper ran front page apology for what it said was plagiarism on his part. The Globe And Mail is carrying a Canadian Press story about the issue. Taylor takes issue with the paper's reaction. An excerpt:

Taylor said he was shocked the newspaper made the dispute public with the published apology.

"This came as a real kick in the gut," he said in an interview.

"I was not fired with cause, nor was I forced out. I resigned because it was clear I was getting no support from the Winnipeg Free Press. Why they decided to do what they did [Wednesday] is stunning to me."

The editor of the Free Press said the apology followed a "painstaking investigation."

Taylor, who spent 23 years at the paper, is also a regular on The Score television network and has made numerous appearances on CBC Newsworld.

The article at the centre of the controversy also allegedly contained a quote that first appeared in an NFL news release. However, Free Press editor Nicholas Hirst told readers the quote was slightly altered and attributed to Kansas City Chiefs' head coach Dick Vermeil, while the NFL release attributed the comment to Brad Childress, offensive co-ordinator of the Philadelphia Eagles.

Another quote from an NFL release was also allegedly changed.

The story focused on a stricter enforcement this year of an NFL interference rule, which has resulted in an increase in passing yards.

"The Free Press regrets this breach of our journalistic standards and apologizes," wrote Hirst.

Also of note is this sentence in the story: "Given the ease with which journalists can now cut and paste information from the Internet, some newspapers in the U.S. are considering, or have already employed, anti-plagiarism software." Email us if your newspaper has installed this software.

UPDATE -- Here's an excerpt from the Free Press apology:

"AN article published in the Free Press sports section on Nov. 5, under the headline "Passing attacks have room to grow in NFL," was wrongly presented as the original work of a Free Press writer.  In fact, one of the quotes in the article was first published in the daily newspaper USA Today, as was much of the text that appeared outside quotation marks.

The article also contained a quote that first appeared in a National Football League news release, attributed to Brad Childress, offensive co-ordinator of the Philadelphia Eagles. The quote was slightly altered and attributed to Kansas City Chiefs' head coach Dick Vermeil in the Free Press piece.

A quote by Minnesota Vikings' offensive co-ordinator Scott Linehan, which also originally appeared in an NFL press release, was altered too.

The Free Press regrets this breach of our journalistic standards and apologizes."

November 25, 2004 at 08:01 AM | Permalink

November 19, 2004

Bump 'n' correct

Miamiherald_2R. Kelly has been accused of a lot of things -- and almost all of them have to do with underage girls, a camera, and his sex face -- but one paper fell for an accusation that wasn't true, and has been tardy in correcting the error.

It started when an article about R. Kelly that appeared to be from The Associated Press made its way around the internet. Then it landed in the pages of The Miami Herald.

Here's the correction from The Herald that ran yesterday:

An item in Saturday's People column incorrectly reported that R&B singer R. Kelly had been hit with a summons by the family of singer Ashanti, for allegedly making sexual advances toward her younger sister while backstage at a recent awards show.
''This is an Internet hoax and was never reported by The Associated Press,'' said Kristin Gazlay, AP deputy managing editor for national news. "It's all over the place.''
There is no truth to the item; no charges are pending.

An AP story also sought to clarify the issue and quoted the Herald's executive editor:

Herald executive editor Tom Fiedler said Wednesday the story was passed along to an editor of the Herald's celebrity news by someone else in the newsroom. Fiedler said he believed the person picked it up off the Internet because it "had the appearance of an Associated Press story or seemed to be attributed to AP. The editor took it and unfortunately failed to verify it moved on the AP wire."
The Herald's procedures and ethics require "that any item that comes to us be verified as to its source," particularly if the source is the Internet, Fiedler said.

But R. Kelly put out a press release to correct the story nearly a week before the Herald correction ran:

LOS ANGELES, Nov. 11 /PRNewswire/ -- A fake story allegedly written by the Associated Press about R&B star R. Kelly and the younger sister of R&B vocalist Ashanti has been circulating on the Internet and was mistakenly picked up and broadcast on at least two major radio stations.
Supposedly written by AP music reporter Nekesa Mumbi Moody, the phony story makes false claims from unnamed sources that Kelly made sexual advances toward Ashanti's younger sister at a recent awards show.  There is no truth to this story or any subsequent reports based on this false and misleading hoax.
Ashanti personally telephoned New York radio station HOT 97 this morning to set the record straight.  AP reporter Nekesa Mumbi Moody has also confirmed that the article was not written by her nor distributed by the Associated Press wire service.

And if you check on Google, you can see that many online news sources had the scoop on the hoax long before the Herald got around to making its correction and the AP put out a story to clarify the issue.

November 19, 2004 at 08:00 AM | Permalink

November 17, 2004

How to punish good samaritans

Akron_1So let's say you're at the gas station in Akron, Ohio and maybe you're filling up, or maybe you work there or are just passing by. And then you spot some guy leaving the joint with beer he didn't pay for. You think "Hey! That's wrong. I always pay for my beer and this guy's trying to get drunk for free." So you call the cops and tell them. They come and arrest the guy. You feel good about yourself, think you did a good deed. Maybe you go home and crack a few yourself and wait to see if your act will be reported in the paper the next day. Maybe they'll call you a hero. So you wake up the next morning and, yup, there's your name in print:

A Crime Watch report in the Nov. 7 Community Extra section erroneously identified Kent resident Bertram Haft as being arrested for leaving a Citgo station without paying for beer valued at $2.58. Haft was actually the person who reported the theft to police. The error was made by a correspondent.

And we wonder why some people don't trust the media.

November 17, 2004 at 08:00 AM | Permalink

November 12, 2004

GL Joe!

Trib_flub_3Chicagoist exposes the US's new Top Secret fighting force: GL's.

 

November 12, 2004 at 07:45 AM | Permalink

November 10, 2004

Hey, you look familiar...

KnightridderA story from Knight Ridder about Myra Belle ''Sally" Miller, the woman who filed a sexual harassment suit against some Quakers thanks to an alleged affair with Bill Clinton, contained a passage that implied she might have been Sally Miller Perdue, a former Miss Arkansas who posed for Playboy:

She hung up before the reporter could ask if she was the Sally Miller Perdue, Miss Arkansas 1958, who has claimed to have had a three-month affair with Clinton in 1983...Perdue later appeared as a Playboy centerfold.

Looks like she isn't, and The Boston Globe has run a correction:

Because of an error by Knight Ridder, an article in the Nation pages on Oct. 30 about Myra Belle ''Sally" Miller, who has filed a sexual and religious harassment lawsuit against the West Chester (Pa.) Meeting of Friends over her alleged affair in 1983 with Bill Clinton, stated that she had appeared as a Playboy centerfold. Miller never posed for Playboy.

There are lots of other papers running the story but we haven't seen any with a correction yet. Of course, The Globe isn't exactly clear about what the "error" in the wire story was. The article implies that the woman in question might be the same as one who posed for Playboy, but it doesn't directly state that she is. Better to error on the side of caution, but the correction could be clearer.

November 10, 2004 at 08:00 AM | Permalink

November 09, 2004

Election erection

JacksonLooks like we've found a winner for the worst election error. The Florida Times-Union ran the phone number for a non-partisan organization tracking the election on its front page on election day. Unfortunately, the number was for -- what else? -- a phone sex line. Reader Advocate Mike Clark explains why it shouldn't have happened:

While Times-Union reporters fanned out to polling places last Tuesday, the most interesting flub of Election Day happened on the newspaper's own front page.

A toll-free number to a non-partisan organization tracking the election turned out to be painfully wrong. Instead, the wrong number referred callers to a sex talk service. Of course, this never should have happened, since the newsroom's policy is that all phone numbers should be called before publication.

Thanks to Vincent for finding this one.

November 09, 2004 at 08:00 AM | Permalink

October 28, 2004

Chicago Tribune or George Carlin?

Chictrib
Early Tuesday morning, several top editors from the Chicago Tribune were hard at work removing a section from that day's paper. Once you can get past the image of highly-paid newspaper folks on their hands and knees physically yanking a section out of thousands of copies, the question of "why" becomes important. The answer: because some c*ck let a story get on the front page of the WomanNews section with a headline that included the word "c_nt". That's right: they were talking about the word "cunt" and decided to give the story a saucy headline. Give credit to the Wall Street Journal for getting the story:

The article, which ran under the headline "You c_nt say that," was cleared by editors Geoff Brown and Cassandra West, who oversee the paper's Wednesday WomanNews section. Tribune editors said Ms. Lipinski discovered the story was slated to run at the newspaper's regular morning editorial meeting, but the section had already been preprinted ahead of the daily press run. A spokeswoman for the newspaper said a "very nominal" number of subscribers received the story and declined to comment on any possible disciplinary action as a result of the incident. She said the paper's public editor, who addresses reader issues, plans to address the situation in a future column.

An editor's note in today's edition offered an apology. "Senior editors determined that the story was inappropriate after the preprinted section went to press. Most copies were removed from Wednesday's edition of the paper, though a relatively small number of copies may still contain it. A new version of the section was printed in time to be distributed to a substantial number of readers today. Those who did not receive the revised section will find it in Thursday's Tribune. The Tribune regrets any offense and inconvenience to its readers."

Our favorite line in the story, however, is this: "Tribune editors said Teamster employees eventually forced them to stop pulling the section late last night because they needed to start printing another newspaper." You know it's serious when the teamsters step in because they want to work.

October 28, 2004 at 11:33 AM | Permalink

October 27, 2004

Prickly City: the saga continues

Universalps_2
This one just won't die. The link that was originally published in a Prickly City comic and then hijacked by a bestiality pornographer has now been redirected to...the John Kerry site. (Follow the trail here.) So it looks like Kerry has the pornographer vote all wrapped up. Test it out for yourself: http://www.coyotepac.org. With thanks to Joshua for pointing this out.

October 27, 2004 at 09:00 AM | Permalink

October 25, 2004

Getting paid by the Post to blow kisses at Cheney

Washpost_1
The Washington Post steps up to the plate to correct an error. Oh yeah, and to admit it staged and paid for the whole darn thing:

"In the Oct. 17 Sunday Source, the 'Gatherings' story described a Republican barbecue held to watch a presidential debate. The item reported 'the possibly unprecedented occurrence of a young woman in a cowboy hat pretending to make out with a poster of Dick Cheney.' The item should have explained that the woman was asked to pose with the vice president's picture by the photographer working for The Washington Post. The woman also did not pretend to 'make out' with the picture; at the photographer's suggestion, she pretended to blow a kiss at it. The item should have explained that the party was hosted in response to a request from The Post, which discussed the decorations and recipes with the host and agreed to reimburse the cost of recipe ingredients."

Thank the lord we now know no one would willingly make out with an image of Dick Cheney.

October 25, 2004 at 09:00 AM | Permalink

October 22, 2004

Update: Prickly City porn

Universalps_1
We'd like to thank Logan and Tom for helping us find the URL that comic strip Prickly City published earlier this week. (Check our original post.) As many of you may know by now, Prickly City published a strip on the 19th that included a web address that was unregistered at the time. But the URL was soon snapped up and redirected to a porn site. We placed a call for you folks to help us locate the original address and here it is: www.coyotepac.org. Wait! Before you click, be warned that it goes to a very nasty bestiality site.

For the record, those of you who still click on the link are officially sick.

October 22, 2004 at 02:32 PM | Permalink

Comic porn

Universalps
This is perhaps the sexiest error we've seen yet. A comic strip, Prickly City, included a link to a URL that was unregistered at press time. But just a few hours after the strip appeared, an enterprising pornographer registered the site and promptly threw up some push-push content. It is made all the more scandalous because the comic strip in question "offers a conservative perspective on political and social events within an ongoing storyline," according to the UPS website. Editor and Publisher has the full scoop on it, and here's a correction notice that ran in The Chicago Tribune:

In Tuesday's, Wednesday's and today's preprinted Tempo sections, the comic strip "Prickly City" contains a Web address, or URL, that links to a pornographic site. In a statement released Wednesday, the strip's provider, Universal Press Syndicate, explained that at the time the strip was filed, the address was "fictional and satirical" and led to an unregistered site. "Regrettably," the statement continued, "this site was registered midday on Oct. 19 following its appearance in the strip that morning. This URL now leads to an adult Web site." The syndicate added that it is "reviewing its policy of running fictional and unregistered URLs within its content." Tomorrow's strip has been corrected to eliminate the Web address.

Anyone out there know what the URL was? Email us. For research, of course.

October 22, 2004 at 09:00 AM | Permalink

October 20, 2004

They were all wrong

WashbattleThe Washington Times is doing its best to start a pulp catfight over an error made by The Washington Post. The story and its resulting Page One headline in The Post on October 7, “incorrectly attributed a quotation to Charles A. Duelfer, the chief U.S. weapons inspector in Iraq. The statement, "We were almost all wrong," was made by Duelfer's predecessor, David Kay, at a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing Jan. 28,” according to the correction The Post ran.

The next day The Times ran a story to rub salt in the wound, and then it named The Post headline writer as its “knave” of the week for “allowing bias to cloud judgment.” In the midst of its gloating the Times also made an interesting statement when it reprinted the correction notice from The Post by saying, “…unfortunately, corrections often go unnoticed.” So true, especially when your corrections page remains blank for several weeks as The Times’ has.

This Post mistake has, however, raised an interesting question: should an error on the front page require a front page correction? Matthew Felling, media director for the Center for Media and Public Affairs, says yes. "Mistakes on other pages can rightly be corrected on Page A2," he told The Times, saying that front page mistakes require front page corrections.

While we wait patiently for that to happen, have a look at all the other stories from around the world that are carrying the misattributed quote. We’ll give some props to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution for stepping up and running a correction. But it looks like hardly anyone else has corrected the error, let alone run a front page notice…

October 20, 2004 at 10:00 AM | Permalink

October 11, 2004

Oprah is everywhere!

Oprah
Almost everybody reported that none other than Oprah was among the A-list guests at Tiger Woods' secretive wedding last week. But hardly any media outlets have corrected the error. It also seems that very few bothered to call Miss O's company to verify the claim, and so it was up to her to set the record straight on a show last week. The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel is one of few who stepped up to the plate to correct the erroneous AP report, along with a columnist for the Chicago Sun-Times. But there are still a ton of stories out there that have yet to be corrected.

October 11, 2004 at 03:25 PM | Permalink