When Did James Madison Die?

What to do if you're being busted for not correcting an error that's been made repeatedly in the op-ed pages of your paper, despite your promises to issue timely corrections, busted most embarrassingly by the public editor of your own paper?

Publish a letter insisting that nothing gives you more smug self-satisfaction than to correct errors since after all, accuracy is everything to those in the newspapering business -- but then be sure to point out that this particular error is utterly meaningless.

The most important motive for correcting the minor glitches is history. These days, everything we publish is stored not only in the Times archives and commercially available archives, but in the files of an army of search engines. We don't want a college student of 2050 to come up with the wrong year for James Madison's death because of our error - particularly not when we have the means to amend the record. The news section of the paper publishes this kind of corrections in a separate For-the-Record listing. That seems like a good idea - particularly because it makes it easier for readers to notice the other kind of corrections, which really make a difference. Those shouldn't get lost amid the misspelled names and miscalculated dates.

From now on, we're going to use a similar system. A "For the Record" column of errata will run under the editorials whenever it's appropriate. The first one appears today. It corrects several misstatements about when Joe Allbaugh, the former FEMA director, met his successor, Michael Brown, now legendary as a disaster in his own right. Although there have been multitudinous references throughout the media to the two as former college chums or college roommates, they in fact went to different schools. A spokeswoman for Mr. Allbaugh says that while they have been close pals for a long time, they met after graduation. Obviously, if we're debating the serious issue of allegations about cronyism at FEMA, a friend is a friend whether the relationship was born off campus or on. That's what makes this one perfect grist for "For the Record." (My emph.)

In other words, this error is no more significant than if a name had been misspelled, or if the numbers in a date from the 1800s had been off by a year or two. Which is to say, at the end of the day, no harm, no foul.

I don't think that's quite what the Public Editor had in mind when he was told the issue would be addressed in an upcoming Letter, given that the same mistake had been made on multiple occasions without correction.

At one level she's obviously right. There is little substantive difference between saying they've been friends since college and saying they've been friends for twenty or twenty-five years. At another level, it's a huge difference, and if Gail Collins doesn't recognize this she's a phenomenally obtuse and incompetent editor for columnists and opinion writers. Which is why I believe she does recognize it.

The difference is this: she isn't editing straight news pieces, she's editing opinion writers who seek to persuade through the force of their argument and the force of their writing. And in that sense there is a difference, and a big one, between saying that these two men have been friends for many years and saying that they were college roommates: the second has far more rhetorical force. It just sounds, and writes, better, if that's the argument you want to make.

So simply tossing this off as if it were a misspelled name doesn't get it. This does function as substantive information because it meets this simple test: does the discovery that it isn't true appear to weaken the case made by those columnists who used the information? If the answer is even incrementally yes, then it's way, way more than an incorrect date and needs to be treated as such.

Comments

[jdallen]

On the other hand - and there always is one, isn't there? - many bloggers spout all kinds of stuff with little or no pretense of accuracy. We, the readers, have to somewhat disbelieve everything we read, pick and choose what we wish to believe, which I think is what everyone does, anyhow, in the end.

Sorta like all the horror stories spread about the Superdome in NO and the Astrodome in Houston. Until I got some information I could be sure was true from trusted people who were there, I had no choice but to believe or disbelieve the reportage, most of which was wildly inaccurate, and remains uncorrected and unapologized for.

[Betsy Markum]

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