Imagine this scenario:

You go to a television station for a job interview. Someone walks into a room and calls your name. You follow. The next thing you know, you’re being interviewed on live television about a topic tangential to your specialty. You start thinking it might be a mistake, especially when you realize the name the interviewer used is similar to yours, but it isn’t actually yours. The interviewer doesn’t seem to notice the mistake.

The Daily Mail relates the BBC’s recent unfortunate incident of mistaken identity on live television. A producer entered a waiting room, called a name, and took someone into the studio for a live interview. As you might imagine from what else I’ve written here, it turned out to be the wrong person who had a similar name to the guest the producer wanted. The Daily Mail has a copy of the resulting video. The man who was supposed to be on the news show explains a little bit more and points out the Daily Mail’s incorrect identification of the man as a cab driver. It seems he might have been at the studio that day for a job interview.

There’s been a lot of talk about the reporting of the Sago, West Virginia, mine tragedy. On Monday, an explosion trapped some miners. Rescue efforts began. Tuesday night, I saw a brief piece on the 11 pm news claiming the miners were still trapped. Wednesday’s morning paper carried a story saying the miners were supposedly alive. On my way to work, I noticed the front page in a newspaper box was different and indicated the news was bad, not good. More recent news on the Web revealed there was some confusion about the news from the command center. It seems that someone misinterpreted the report of finding the miners to mean that rescuers found them alive. Someone told the families the miners were alive. Soon after word began to spread, officials of the mining company knew the information was incorrect, but waited to make sure they had their facts straight before beginning to correct the misinformation. About three hours passed between the first wrong report and the company disseminating the accurate information.

Meanwhile, many media outlets were reporting the wrong news that the miners had survived. Newspapers printed and began distributing the day’s edition, some with the faulty good news instead of the accurate bad news.

What are media outlets doing now? Does this kind of situation warrant a correction?

According to a chat on Newslib, some outlets aren’t publishing corrections because this kind of situation doesn’t fall within their correction policies. Others are publishing follow-up stories explaining the situation. Some editors and columnists will write about the confusion.

There’s a lot of pressure in situations like this to deliver good news. Timing complicated things because word was going out as a lot of newspapers were moving through the presses. Would this incorrect information have spread through print media as it did if events were happening at 10 am instead of midnight? Unlikely. Print journalists would have had time during the day to verify the reports and get official statements.

The first news story in a fixed medium I read about the miners said they were "reportedly" found alive. For some reason, I didn’t clue in to the fact that the media outlet was publishing an unverified claim and that’s why it used "reportedly." I wondered about the use of the term when I first read it, but I didn’t realize exactly what its use meant until I saw the second version of the same paper with the different front page and a story explaining the miscommunication.

This situation shows how complicated controlling information can be during a crisis and how imperative it is to get facts correct. I imagine we’ll discuss what happened in this situation the next time we discuss communicating during an emergency at work. Sometimes, the devil really is in the details.

More:

Greg Mitchell of Editor & Publisher looks at the situation and includes this quote from Poynter faculty member Scott Libin:

"This case reminds us of a lesson we learned, at least in part, from Hurricane Katrina: Even when plausibly reliably sources such as officials pass along information, journalists should press for key details….If we believe that when your mama says she loves you, you should check it out, surely what the mayor or police chief or governor says deserves at least some healthy skepticism and verification. I understand how emotion and adrenaline and deadlines affect performance. That does not excuse us from trying to do better."

Romenesko has bits from various outlets about how they handled the developing story, including stopping the presses.

Regret the Error lays some of the blame and responsibility on the mining company, since they seem to have known shortly after the rumor began spreading that it wasn’t true, yet did not actively combat it until several hours later.

The Newseum’s Web site offers front pages each day. Perhaps they’ll keep an archive of these pages because of their importance to the history of journalism.

This seems like the kind of thing Bob will talk about in his journalism classes. I wonder what he’s going to do with it.

What will people remember about these media reports? What will the historical record show? Will people only remember the headlines of the miners surviving they glimpsed during their commute? Or will they read deeper to uncover the series of mistakes that led to the media having incorrect information?

A apologetic note on the front page of the Web site for the public radio show Marketplace indicates content from a June 13 broadcast came uncited from Slate magazine. Marketplace said they are conducting an internal review to prevent the plagiarism from happening again.

The Chicago Tribune reports on an erroneous Newsweek article about Guantanamo Bay interogators desecrating the Koran. The article may have inspired violent protests in Afghanistan that resulted in some deaths. The US government is asking for a retraction. Newsweek explains their perspective and covers the situation.

(I feel like Sooz here: the May 9 Periscope column is still on Newsweek’s site. Why don’t they link to it from their follow-up articles?)

JSL sent me this link to Scott Rosenberg’s piece No reader is an island. Near the middle of the piece reviewing some problems with the media, Rosenberg discusses errors–a subject Newslib has been buzzing about lately–and how easy it is to make errors and what journalists and news organizations can do to correct them. He credits Internet technology like weblogs for holding news organizations more accountable for errors.

"Until recently, each reader who saw the holes in the occasional story he knew well was, in essence, an island; and most of those readers rested in some confidence that, even though that occasional story was problematic, the rest of the paper was, really, pretty good. Only now, the Net — and in particular the explosion of blogs, with their outpouring of expertise in so many fields — has connected those islands, bringing into view entire continents of inadequate, hole-ridden coverage."

***

"Blogging potentially allows CEOs and politicians, companies and institutions to tell their own stories in their own words, and that’s dandy, but I’d never trust it as the only record. Coverage of important news by smart generalists — disinterested generalists — remains of great public value. But too many practitioners of this venerable art have grown (figuratively) fat and lazy from their monopoly position. They’re not used to being challenged, they don’t like being challenged, and too often their first reflex when challenged is to question the motive of the challenger.

Now the monopoly is fraying, the challenges are coming on in a wave, and the entire field is at a crossroads. As a profession, journalism has a choice: It can persist in a defensive, circle-the-wagons stance, pretending that nothing has changed. … Or it can accept the presence of millions of teeming critical voices as a challenge to shape up and do a better job."

Bwah ha ha ha!

I just report what’s out there. I don’t find errors myself … often.

Hiawatha Bray of The Boston Globe and the Associated Press’ Ken Maguire update us about the vetting of Michelle Delio’s work in several publications, including MIT’s Technology Review. Her work came under criticism after Technology Review staff discovered a source she used had misrepresented himself to her. Bray tells us what other publications for which Delio wrote are doing to investigate her work and take action to either correct errors or notify readers that her work might be problematic.

Technology Review removed all of her articles from its Web site and put an editor’s note in their place.

InfoWorld has taken steps to change faulty articles. The piece Enterprise collaboration with blogs and wikis now has this disclaimer at the top in italics:

"This article has been modified from its original version. Certain quoted material has been removed because its veracity could not be confirmed."

Other articles of hers in that publication lack a disclaimer. Does that mean they’re fine or that no one has looked at them yet?

News librarians have expressed concerns that modifying stories after they’re printed changes the historical record. Finding a balance between leaving articles with possible errors in them, correcting mistakes, and informing readers about potential problems can be tricky. Would it have been better for InfoWorld to leave the questionable material in along with a note indicating its potential problem(s)?

The Boston Herald reports details about its rival The Boston Globe letting a freelance writer go after learning she fabricated part of an article about culling seals in Canada. The Globe informed readers through a brief note in Friday’s For the record section on page A2.

Barbara Stewart reported the event as an eyewitness. A Canadian government agency confronted the Globe about the article because the event was postponed due to weather.

A Globe executive editor said they’ve already reviewed other articles Stewart wrote for the paper and found no errors. Stewart previously wrote for The New York Times for about ten years.

The Washington Post has more on the situation.

Michelle Delio, a freelancer who has written for Technology Review and Wired News, is facing a review because of using a source who misrepresented himself to her.

Regret The Error tracks errors in North American media and errors involving the media, as well. A number of recent posts give examples of how political candidates misuse news quotes in their campaign materials.

The links on the right navbar go to online corrections for many news outlets, ombudspeople, and sources about journalism.

noticed on Newslib, a discussion list for news librarian