Oops! We Aired . . . Uh, Make That Erred

Alone among Britain’s big newspapers, the Guardian bares its soul in a daily confessional--the Corrections and Amplifications column.

Often it’s routine, but sometimes there is a heartbreaking story, a tale of human fallibility so sad you have to laugh:

April 21, 1998: “The home of Charles Darwin, author of “On the Origin of Species,” is Down House in Kent. It was garbled in a news report on page 12 on April 11.”

April 22, 1998: “In a correction published in this column yesterday, we misspelt Downe House, the home of Charles Darwin in Kent.”

April 23, 1998: “A correction to a correction of a correction. Darwin spelled both the name of his house and the village in which it is situated, Down. The village became Downe. The house is still Down.”

Although many American newspapers have institutionalized corrections columns, Corrections and Amplifications breaks with the British practice of rarely admitting error, and then usually only after lawyers have become involved. The column, which often forgoes the serious tone of newspaper corrections, has been a fixture on the editorial page since Nov. 5, 1997.

“It strikes you, doing this job, that newspapers are the perfect invention for making mistakes,” says Ian Mayes, who was given the title of readers’ editor when he was put in charge of the column. He works from a tiny cubicle in the newsroom where, he quips, “I can see mistakes being made.”

He collected some of his favorite corrections in a book, “The Guardian Corrections and Amplifications,” published in November by the newspaper.

Florida Fix Carried a Byline

Mayes gets letters, phone calls and a couple of dozen e-mails each day pointing out possible errors, leading to an average of five corrections in the next day’s paper.

An e-mail from Rick Cundiff, a reporter at the Star-Banner in Ocala, Fla., led to one recent correction. The Guardian had said a Florida man shot his dog because he suspected it was gay. As Cundiff knew from covering the case, the man had beaten the dog and fractured its skull, and it was put down by a veterinarian.

“This is an indication of the way in which newspaper readership is now blossoming out into the Internet,” says Mayes, who credited Cundiff by name in the column.

“That’s the first correction that’s appeared in the paper with a byline on it,” he says. “I thought it was so extraordinary.”

Mayes doesn’t shy from having a laugh at the newspaper’s expense:

Aug. 21, 1998: “We spelt Morecambe, the town in Lancashire, wrong again on page 2, G2, yesterday. We often do.”

“People remember that in a way that has sort of surprised me,” Mayes says. “But the intention was that it would be memorable . . . particularly to the journalists on the Guardian so that they would stop doing it. And I think by and large it doesn’t occur in the way that it used to.”

The paper’s two bigger rivals, the Daily Telegraph and the Times, think little errors aren’t worth worrying about.

“We usually try to meet people’s request for a correction if it really is a serious correction. Like other papers, we don’t put in corrections for minor things, misspellings and so forth, but if it affects someone adversely we try to do it right away,” says Frank Taylor, ombudsman and associate editor at the Telegraph.

Brian MacArthur, associate editor of the Times, says: “We haven’t gone so far as the Guardian, but we do have a flourishing letters page where readers can take issue with the editor.”

But confession has other benefits besides setting the record straight, Mayes says.

“What people want is someone to take their complaint seriously, look at it impartially and say, ‘OK, they got it wrong, and this is how we will put it right.’ And they don’t often--in fewer cases than otherwise--pursue it. So the number of cases our lawyer has been getting as the result of that kind of thing has dropped since I started three years ago.”

It helps, he adds, that the corrections have developed a following.

“The aim is to make them readable. It must mean very often--this is an assertion for which I have no proof--that more people read the correction than read the original story.”

Some corrections are excruciating:

Jan. 28, 1998: “An item headed Bad Day: Educashun, in a sidebar on the Policy and Politics page, page 11, yesterday, derived mild amusement from numerous spelling mistakes in a Labor Party jobs advertisement carried in the previous day’s paper. All the errors were, in fact, made by the Guardian. None of them was in the original copy supplied by the Labor Party.”

“The Labor Party people went berserk, basically because they were paying for an advertisement to go in the Guardian,” Mayes says. The resulting humorous piece, he says, was a case of a writer “doing something completely stupid.”

Typos, Homophones and Inspiration

Typographical errors are part of the Guardian’s legend, and the reason the satirical magazine Private Eye always calls it the Grauniad.

Occasionally the typos are inspired:

Aug. 24, 1998: “ . . . we referred to the 250,000 [pounds] advance for Vikram Seth’s prize-winning novel, ‘A Suitable Buy.’ Although undoubtedly worth every penny, the book is actually called ‘A Suitable Boy.’ ”

Homophones--words that sound alike but have different spellings and meanings--are a particular bugbear.

The Guardian has owned up to wrongly substituting illicits for elicits, ex-patriots for expatriates, throws for throes, rung for wrung, diffusing for defusing, shoot for chute, insighted for incited, peddle for pedal and pour for pore.

Then there was the embarrassment of a “bear bottom” and the nuisance of “loud-mouthed and chauvinistic boars.”

And this:

Feb. 2, 1999: “The absence of corrections yesterday was due to a technical hitch rather than any sudden onset of accuracy.”

Guardian corrections: https://www.guardianunlimited.co.uk/corrections