An update to this post:
In today’s National Post (Canada, center-right editorially), they write this editorial. I hope Canada’s liberal-left Globe and Mail takes notice and apologizes for their error. And like CBS, I think they should have a small banner of some kind indicating that they are a liberal-left medium, as a way to warn readers/viewers to take everything they see with a grain of salt, and so that they can seek out more balanced mediums.
Media watch: The Globe v. George Jonas
National Post
Wednesday, September 29, 2004
Like everyone else, journalists make mistakes. That is why every reputable newspaper has a “corrections” section. Though an error set to print cannot be undone, good editors understand that they have an obligation to their readers to set the record straight.
We raise this long-standing journalistic convention because it appears to be one our colleagues at The Globe And Mail have abandoned.
That newspaper’s op-ed page recently published a column by National Council on Canada-Arab Relations executive director Mazen Chouaib. In the column, Mr. Chouaib vigorously criticized the National Post and its parent company, CanWest Global Television, which he believes harbour an anti-Muslim and anti-Arab bias. To support his case, he supplied two quotations from National Post columnist George Jonas—including “Islam is at fault for blowing up civilians” and “[Islam] is the new evil empire” (the square brackets are Mr. Chouaib’s).
But as Mr. Jonas reported on these pages two days ago, he never wrote these things. Mr. Chouaib appears to have simply made the quotations up.
We do not believe the Globe was complicit in this smear. What likely happened was that the mistakes were contained in Mr. Chouaib’s submission, and the Globe’s editors, eager to rush into print a juicy take-down of a competitor, published it without checking the article’s less credible elements. No doubt, they are embarrassed by the error. Certainly, they should be.
Last week, The Globe and Mail published a letter from CanWest publications vice-president Scott Anderson pointing out Mr. Chouaib’s error. And perhaps the newspaper’s management feels this is sufficient to rectify matters. But it’s not. Letters to the editor appear on a newspaper’s comment pages. They are presented as nothing more than the opinion of the person whose name appears in the byline. A correction, by contrast, connotes a publication’s official acceptance of the fact that a mistake was made. Corrections also serve to mark the archived version of faulty articles stored in electronic databases—to ensure errors are not reproduced unwittingly.
Unfortunately, this is not the first time that the Globe has refused to acknowledge a mistake involving CanWest. Last month, the newspaper published an article indicating that a senior CanWest officer was facing imminent dismissal. The story was false—as the officer’s continued employment attests. Yet the Globe refused to issue a correction or even to publish a letter from CanWest refuting the story.
There is nothing wrong with media outlets printing criticism or gossip about their competitors. We ourselves have taken the Globe to task many times in this space. But the desire to score points should never cause editors to lose sight of basic journalistic principles. Mr. Jonas is owed his correction. Indeed, as a respectable newspaper, the Globe owes it to itself.
PTBC was founded by Mr. Johannesen in 2000.
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