Over the past several months I have had the honor of being Big Journalism’s official Correction Alpaca. I’ve requested over two dozen corrections at Big Journalism and many others on Big Hollywood, Twitter, and via email. Some of the news organizations I’ve addressed have done their journalistic duty and set their respective records straight, while others have neglected to fulfill this journalistic responsibility. Others still have delivered what Patterico refers to as “stealth corrections,” that is, where a post is corrected without formal acknowledgment by the publication that the public record had been amended. We acknowledge there is a time and place for this, but it’s done far, far, far too often in the internet age.
If you recall, my responsibilities as Correction Alpaca commenced in order to alert the blogosphere of the mainstream media’s culpability and ineptitude in its mostly incorrect reporting of the James O’Keefe caper at Senator Landrieu’s Louisiana office earlier this year. As of Wednesday, this saga, dubbed “Watergate Jr.,” by MSNBC has come to an end, with O’Keefe pleading guilty to mere misdemeanor charges of entering federal property under false pretenses and getting a proverbial “slap on the wrist” sentence.
So, in memory of “Watergate Jr.,” I would like to draw your attention to these sites, which at the time of this publication, still have published unforced errors regarding the prank in New Orleans:
Newsweek
The Los Angeles Times
The Atlantic…
The Huffington Post
MSNBC
Daily Kos
The Hill
The New York Daily News
The Dallas Morning News
The Greensboro News & Record
David Shuster, MSNBC
Keith Olbermann, MSNBC
National Journal
Other sites, such as the Huffington Post, the New Jersey Star-Ledger, and particularly the New Orleans Times-Picayune stealth-corrected posts but failed to issue correction updates. The Times-Picayune was likely the originator of the endless stream of lies and misinformation spread about O’Keefe and his activist colleagues during the Louisiana affair, as it was by far the most common source cited by other news outlets. Given that the misinformation advanced by their publication spread like a virus, the least they could do is own up to it.
We encourage you to contact these publications, their authors, and editors. These corrections are still a worthwhile pursuit and serve to provide an even greater check on the negligent and often rancorous mainstream media.
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