August 9, 2007

Regret the Error

The website of Media Ethics magazine has a long and very in-depth look at the newspaper industry's record on correcting errors, based on a review of all of the many newspaper corrections collected in 2005 at RegretTheError.com - a fantastic blog that catalogs newspaper corrections.

Says Media Ethics: To evaluate the current state of newspaper corrections, we compiled criteria that indicated completeness, indirectly based on a watershed newspaper study done in 1986 for the Gannett Center for Media Studies by D. Charles Whitney. ... As our analysis documents, newspapers neither have become more vigilant nor transparent since Whitney's study in the mid-1980s."

Read the whole thing.