Washington Post ombudsman slams mistake-filled media: “As errors grow, so does a credibility gap”

A single major error can damage a news organization. But incessant lesser ones can be more harmful. Like a cancer, they gradually destroy credibility and eventually sever the organization’s bond of trust with its audience.

Many readers say that’s happening with The Post….

It’s an industrywide problem. Teresa Schmedding, president of the American Copy Editors Society, predicts more burnout. “There’s only so long you can work in complete and utter chaos and keep your energy level up,” said Schmedding, who is with the Daily Herald in suburban Chicago.

Post ombudsman Andrew Alexander has written a devastating piece on the state of the modern media, “As errors grow, so does a credibility gap.”

Ever-shrinking newsrooms and increased pressure on surviving journalists are destroying two thirds of Joseph Pulitzer’s “standing order to his staff” of reporters: “ACCURACY. TERSENESS. ACCURACY.”

I’m going to excerpt this must read-piece at length because it contains an unintended irony that connects the growing number of small mistakes to the far larger and more dangerous mistakes the Post and the rest of the status quo media are now making on human-caused climate change:

… Many readers say that’s happening with The Post. This summer, and especially over the past month, there has been a spike in complaints about inexcusable “little” mistakes.The problem isn’t new. Two ombudsman columns in the past year have noted increased complaints that mostly involved typos and grammatical errors. But more recently, scores of readers have also complained about obvious factual errors that should have been easy to catch.

Last week, for instance, a Metro section story reported that a mother had “received a 30-day sentence” after being convicted of felony child-neglect. But readers were left scratching their heads because the caption with an accompanying photo of the woman erroneously said she received a suspended three-year sentence.

And there are other recent examples. Last weekend, a chart with a story about New Orleans put its metropolitan area population at 1.2 billion (instead of million). A Sunday Sports section story and photo caption said swimmer Michael Phelps had recently finished 11 seconds faster than his best time in an event (it was actually 11 seconds slower). Another story referred to the Veterans Administration, which was replaced by the Cabinet-level Department of Veterans Affairs more than two decades ago….

Readers care about accuracy. Even mistakes not related to facts, like improper grammar, erode their confidence in The Post’s journalism.”Small mistakes can often be a symptom of a larger problem,” wrote Trena Taylor of Cary, N.C., “and they diminish the prestige of the paper overall, and confidence in the individual articles.”

… Many readers raised that question recently over this front-page headline about the devastating floods in Pakistan: “For Pakistanis, the worse may be still to come.” The headline made it past about a half-dozen editors, including newsroom leaders who are e-mailed a front-page mock-up before deadline each night. No one detected that “worse” should be “worst,” even though the story’s third paragraph said “the worst may be still to come.”Anne Ferguson-Rohrer, a top Post production editor, blamed reduced staffing and the distraction of implementing a new and complex computerized content management system for producing The Post in print and online. Although not a factual mistake, the error proved embarrassing. “Clearly, it should have been caught,” she acknowledged.

What’s ironic is that the biggest mistake the Post made in the story is far more harmful to its readers than the headline, but Alexander never mentions it.

In this entire August 18 front-page piece about how Pakistan has been “staggered by the scale of destruction from this summer’s catastrophic floods” (as well as the 8/15 Post article it links to), the newspaper never mentions global warming or climate change. It never mentions that climate scientists have long been predicting that we would see more extreme deluges or even how one of the most basic facts of human-caused warming is, as Dr. Kevin Trenberth, head of the Climate Analysis Section at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, has explained to me (and any reporter who bothers to call him):

But there is a systematic influence on all of these weather events now-a-days because of the fact that there is this extra water vapor lurking around in the atmosphere than there used to be say 30 years ago. It’s about a 4% extra amount, it invigorates the storms, it provides plenty of moisture for these storms and it’s unfortunate that the public is not associating these with the fact that this is one manifestation of climate change. And the prospects are that these kinds of things will only get bigger and worse in the future.”

So the headline should read, “For Pakistanis and the whole world, the worst is still to come — because of human-caused climate change”

Indeed, many other newspapers whose reporting on the link between extreme deluges and human caused warming hasn’t been great (like the NYT and BBC) had already written pretty good stories on this topic by the time the Post had run their story:

New York Times front-page story: In Weather Chaos, a Case for Global Warming! Trenberth: “It’s not the right question to ask if this storm or that storm is due to global warming, or is it natural variability. Nowadays, there’s always an element of both.” (8/15)
Media wakes up to Hell and High Water: Moscow’s 1000-year heat wave and “Pakistan’s Katrina”: BBC, Reuters, USA Today, Time link warming and extreme weather; Trenberth, Stott, and Masters explain the science (8/12)

It’s not a big surprise, however, that Alexander misses the bark-beetle infested forest for the trees here (see The Post ombudsman whitewashes George Will’s columns, the editors, and his own role).

Alexander offers an explanation for why major newspapers like the Washington Post have become so error riddled — an explanation that suggests the problem is only going to get worse:

Reduced staffing because of summer vacations may be contributing to the problem. And installing the new system is surely a factor. But a prime cause of increased mistakes is The Post’s necessary cost-cutting that has resulted in far fewer people being pressed to do much more. The ranks of The Post’s full-time copy editors have been reduced by roughly half since 2005. Many who remain are among the best in the business. But even with the help of part-timers, their dramatically expanded online duties have stretched them thin.

It’s an industrywide problem. Teresa Schmedding, president of the American Copy Editors Society, predicts more burnout. “There’s only so long you can work in complete and utter chaos and keep your energy level up,” said Schmedding, who is with the Daily Herald in suburban Chicago.

There are few easy fixes. Reporters and other content originators can help by ensuring accuracy from the outset. But if this error-prone process is the new normal, it’s testing the loyalty of readers at a time when The Post desperately needs them.

“I love this paper,” said Tyson Ackermann of Anne Arundel County, who wrote to complain about mistakes in an online story. “But I have never seen such sloppiness.”

“I believe that The Post is one of the most important institutions of its time,” said Ackermann, adding that he is “fearful of a powerful voice in this country losing credibility.”

Uhh, that happened a long time ago, Mr. Ackermann (see And the 2009 “Citizen Kane” award for non-excellence in climate journalism goes to …).

On the fourth anniversary of Climate Progress, this Alexander piece is another reason new media trumps old media. Ironically, Alexander notes:

Many complaints involve mistakes online, where editing sometimes seems minimal. Several readers have said inaccurate information has remained even after they alerted writers or the Web site.

Mistakes are particularly likely online where there are fewer layers of editorial eyeballs and speed is of the essence. I am both the author of most CP posts and its editor, so if I don’t see a typo — or a homophone error from my voice dictation software — it’s going to slip through. But I get emails or comments within minutes and make corrections as fast as they are reported.

But if I had even a tiny fraction of the staff of the Washington Post, I would put in place a system that made the kind of errors they have incredibly rare. It is shameful that they don’t, but then, they appear to have fired most of their fact checkers a long time ago: