Newspaper corrections can be hilarious. Such as one from the New York Times last month. In the po-faced style that goes with the terrain, it noted: “A correction was made on Oct. 4, 2024: An earlier version of this article referred to Dublin, the Irish capital, as a part of Britain. It is not.” Hasn’t been for 102 years!
Still, no one in newspapers/media will crow. There, but for good fortune, go any of us.
A personal favourite, if particularly pertinent these days, is from the Wall Street Journal in March 2018. “An earlier version of this article incorrectly stated that Benjamin Netanyahu said Moses brought water from Iraq. He said the water was brought from a rock.”
Also from 2018, but the Economist magazine this time: “In our article about Kofi Annan on August 23rd we said that he wore a goatee. An alert reader has pointed out that he sported a Van Dyke, which is a goatee plus moustache. Sorry to split hairs.”
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There’s a perfect example of “trial by pedant”: such people plague us all in the news business.
The Morning Sentinel in Illinois carried this in 2017: “Saturday’s story on local artist Joe Henninger reported that Henninger’s bandmate Eric Lyday was on drugs. The story should have read that Lyday was on drums.”
In 2007, the UK’s Guardian carried this gem: “We misspelled the word ‘misspelled’, twice, as ‘mispelled’ in the Corrections and clarifications column on September 26, page 30.”
A 2013 New York Times review of author Ann Pratchett’s book `This is the Story of a Happy Marriage’ said it dealt with issues ranging from “her stabilizing second marriage to her beloved dog”.
In a subsequent letter to the paper, Ms Pratchett pointed out that “while my love for my dog is deep”, it was already married to another dog, “Maggie.” For her own part, she said she was married to Karl VanDevender, and that “we are all very happy in our respective unions”.
My own favourite newspaper correction is from closer to home, The Irish Times of August 22nd, 1991: “In yesterday’s report of the Merriman Summer School, Professor Denis Donoghue was quoted as seeking an openness to the ‘otherness’ of the self. That should have been the ‘otherness’ of the Other.”
Soooooo Irish Times!
Correction, from Latin corrigere, “to put straight.”
