PEADAR KING notes that while newspapers are keen to correct errors, there are no checks and balances online.
EVERY morning I read The New York Times on my phone. I know! It’s not as if we’re not already saturated with US news.
Almost 6,000 people (more than the population of Clonakilty) work for The New York Times, according to its own website. In 2023, It had 9.1 million paying online subscribers worldwide with an adjusted operating profit of $89.8m (€82.7m). A lot of readers and a lot of money.
And yet I am always amazed at the number of errors the paper acknowledges each day. Here are a few recent ones:
It reported that there were 48 Democrats and three independents, not 49 Democrats and two independents, in the Senate. Sounds like a fairly straightforward fact that any reasonable political journalist should know?
The previous day, it confused West Jerusalem with East Jerusalem. Given the sensitivities involved, one would have thought that that most basic of errors would have been avoided.
And the day before that again, the paper confused a female Polish psychiatrist with Pope John Paul II. He would not have been impressed.
It’s not just The New York Times. The organisers of last year’s Dublin City marathon were left red-faced when they ascribed the quotation ‘there are no strangers here: only friends you haven’t met’, to WB Yeats. A quotation they used on the back of the 20,000 medals they issued to all participants in the marathon. Yeats scholars cried foul and were quick to point out that Yeats never uttered those words.
Things went from bad to worse for the organisers when on the reverse side of the medal they inscribed ‘one of Ireland’s famous literary sons this commemorates his 1923 Noble Prize win’. Noble. Nobel. You can see how easy it is to confuse the two.
The airways lit up. An Irish Times columnist gave full vent to the error. As did historian Diarmaid Ferriter, warning against ‘the contemporary casualness about the truth’.
The question is: does it matter?
And the answer is: yes, it does. Evidence-based empirical truth matters. And from writing this column, I know. I still think of my Myross/Moyross error. Referencing Myross, I wrote Moyross!
It’s easy to dismiss such pedantises. In an age of the atomising effects of social media and post truth platforms, journalistic precision is important. Particularly in journalism. Good journalism can challenge the myriad untruths posted on social media. Take Trump’s Truth Social, for example. The most unlikely place to find truth. Worryingly, at the start of this year, Truth Social had about 2m active users.
It is not alone in its wide appeal. Try X, formerly known as Twitter with its, by comparison, paltry 556m users. As of October 2023, X receives around 6.14bn visits per month. Facebook, too, with its over 3bn users. YouTube (2.7bn users). WhatsApp (2.78bn users). Instagram (1.4bn users). WeChat (1.bn users). TikTok (just under 1bn). Telegram (800m users). Snapchat (406m users) And so on. All of which I have garnered from online sources that don’t offer clarifications when they get it wrong.
It is not that everyone who posts on these platforms seeks to deceive, deliberately skews facts, twist stories to suit their own nefarious ideological views. The problem is that sometimes it is hard to distinguish what is true and what is not. Here there are no checks and balances. No fact checking. No sub-editors or editors who spend hours and hours reading submissions before they go to print.
Week-in, week-out about 20 to 22 full-time staff and about 10 regular contributors make this paper, The Southern Star, what it is. Real people with not a Chatbot in sight. When and if they (we) get it wrong, we are told, because the stories we write about are local stories. And people are invested in those stories. That alone is an incentive to get it right. We meet the people we write about.
‘To err is human’ is certainly true. But to err and not acknowledge the error does other humans no favour. It can even cause deliberate and deep-seated harm. Deception and deliberate distortion of the truth are serious matters with serious consequences.
With its 6,000 workforce The New York Times still errs. Some of them might even seem inexplicable.
‘How come they did not notice?’ might be a reasonable response. But each day The New York Times acknowledges it errors and offers corrections. No social media platform does that. That’s why journalism still matters. Local and international.
Diarmaid Ferriter is correct. There are consequences to ‘the contemporary casualness about the truth’.
