MediaBugs is a service for correcting errors and problems in media coverage in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Read Hard to Get a Fix, our new report on the state of corrections in Bay Area media.
Bugs to watch
"Police found the victim at the intersection of 16th Street and Mozart Place after receiving a call at about 9:15 p.m., according to Hugh Carew, a police spokesman." There is no intersection of 16th Street and Mozart Place. They are parallel (though near each other) and do not intersect. Read more
Bloomberg’s poll (PDF), which the story was based on, asked the following (bottom of page five): “Do you think the spill proves off-shore drilling is just too dangerous and should be banned in U.S. waters, or was this a freak accident and offshore drilling can be made safer and... Read more
Diaspora, an open-source project to create a federated system for social networking, raised just over $200,000 through Kickstarter, a crowdfunding platform. Rosen stated the project raised $20,000. Read more
A statistic regarding the black population of California apparently was changed in this story without any notification to readers. The version of the story that I read online on Monday contained this sentence: Blacks make up only 6 percent of the population in California, but unlike two... Read more
Why didn't this story identify the two people with whom the reporter spoke at the scene of the protest? Here's the segment in question: Protesters in San Francisco were separated by metal barricades and lines of police. It was a loud, but peaceful demonstration. "I’m outraged about... Read more
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From the MediaBugs Blog
Bloomberg: a scarlet-letter corrections policy?
One of the things we’re trying to accomplish with MediaBugs is to encourage a change in newsroom culture. Journalists are still often reluctant to admit error, or even discuss the possibility of a mistake, for fear that it undermines their authority. But today a growing number of them understand that accuracy is best served, and [...]
New report! New video! New widget partner!
Today we offer a cornucopia of newness for you: Hard to Get a Fix is the first of what we plan as a regular series of reports on the error reporting and correction practices of Bay Area media organizations. You can read its findings here, and also read our recommendations for best practices in error [...]
Journal’s Sarb-Ox goof, Kos’s flawed polls: New kinds of errors demand new kinds of corrections
Once upon a time in journalism, an error was a mistake in a story, and a correction was a notice published after the fact fixing the error. This kind of errror and correction still exists, but in the new world of news the error/correction cycle keeps mutating into interesting new forms. Consider these two recent [...]