This is, let's hope, our last post about that Newsday story on comic strips that was woefully filled with outdated and incorrect information. The online version of the story was posted to the Newsday website on Thursday, May 3. Here is a link to that article which is, as of this moment, uncorrected. A few determined readers posted corrections in a section that's hard to spot and which I doubt many people read.
The gentleman who authored the article — a longtime Newsday editor and writer who's about to retire after forty years there, certainly didn't read the corrections. Or at least, he hadn't as of the following day when I phoned and told him there were problems with the article. He was quite surprised to hear there was anything wrong with the piece which, he said, he researched in a "comic encyclopedia" in the Newsday library. I directed him to this posting on my weblog here where I itemized most (not all) of the mistakes.
On Saturday, the article ran — errors and all — as a major cover story in a Newsday magazine section. I'm going to guess that this section was already printed or irrevocably "off to press" at the time I phoned the reporter the day before, and that he was powerless to change it.
The following Tuesday morning, May 8, this paragraph appeared in the online Newsday "corrections" section. As I explained here, I thought this was quite insufficient, starting with the fact that few people who read the article would ever see those corrections. I further noted that the original article was still online and still uncorrected.
As you can see, it still is. However, some time last week, another version of the same article popped up on the Newsday site with corrections inserted. Here it is. As with the paragraph in the "corrections" section, we still have the error of saying that Alex Raymond took over the Blondie strip after Chic Young died. I mentioned that in my posting but apparently if the reporter looked at what I wrote to get the other facts, he missed that one or simply decided not to correct it. There is also nothing to contradict the impression that Dan DeCarlo, Bill Ziegler, Allen Saunders and Stan Drake are still alive.
There were a few other things wrong with the original article but I've already spent too much time on this. I only spent any because I wanted to make this point. This is not unique and it's not a rare exception and it's not even the work of an intern with no experience. This is the way too many news sources in this country are. They get it all wrong and then grudgingly do a minimalist, almost covert correction if someone applies a little pressure and/or shame. Some papers these days don't even do that much. (Go ahead. Find me the online "corrections" section for The Washington Times.)
True, there's nothing earth-shattering about citing two dead guys as the current makers of Mary Worth…but this is pretty much the same level of accuracy that The New York Times managed for its coverage of the Whitewater scandal and its early reporting on the Iraq invasion. They did a partial mea culpa on the latter but the record in "The Newspaper of Record" is still scratched.
Lately, a lot of "real journalists" have been decrying bloggers because, among other insults, bloggers don't fact-check and aren't answerable to anyone. That's all true. There's at least as much nonsense and erroneous info in the blogs, probably more. But there's a lot less excuse.