Survey: News websites across US botch error reporting, corrections

The second of our MediaBugs surveys of correction practices — this one nationwide — confirms the pattern we found in our first, Bay-Area-only study: Most news websites make it hard for readers to report errors and find corrections. Here are the gory details.

Interestingly, the cable news networks have the best overall record — a better one than newspapers or magazines. There’s one exception, however: the Fox News website is entirely lacking in any corrections-related content or information: no way to find out if they fixed something and no way to tell them they got it wrong.

As a result of what we found in our first survey, we made a point of incorporating information about the error-correction practices of each media organization right in the MediaBugs interface — you can find it as part of each listing on our Browse by Media Outlet page.

If you’re involved in running one of these websites, have a look at MediaBugs’ best practices page — and know that repairing these problems really isn’t that much work.

If you’re a reader or user of these sites, consider taking the step of telling them about that page: assuming they haven’t buried their email address!

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  1. JackLail.com says:

    Fixing errors online needs some correcting at news organizations…

    We in the press talk a great game about correcting our errors, but in the end do a piss-poor job backing it up. (An academic study of corrections found that only two per cent of verified factual errors were corrected……