Dewey Defeats Edwards… Yet Another News Screwup

Miscellaneous

from the itchy-trigger-fingers dept

The rush to publish first is making for an awful lot of Dewey Defeats Truman style stories showing up this year. Earlier this year, USA Today published a story on their site with the wrong candidate winning the reality TV show The Apprentice. Last month, a Tampa paper incorrectly reported that their own hometown hockey team had lost the Stanley Cup, when, in fact, they had won. The latest is that the NY Post is running into some trouble for reporting that John Kerry picked Dick Gephardt to be his running mate, when the reality is that he picked John Edwards. What’s interesting, though, is that the NY Post has simply deleted the incorrect story from their website, without a notice, explanation or apology. This certainly raises questions about how the press handles mistakes online. It’s a running joke in the news media how they publish huge mistakes on page one, and retract them two weeks later in tiny print hidden in the “corrections” section somewhere in the middle of the paper. However, in an age of instant publication (where people can link to you right away), it seems like a more reasonable thing to do is to admit that you were wrong and post an explanation at that location, rather than simply “disappearing” the story and pretending it never happened.