| Topic Name: |
No correction? |
| Message Name: |
this is from Bowling Green |
| Date Posted: |
05/20/2005 |
| Message: |
This is a message posted by the news director in Bowling Green, Ky about a factual error made during the news and why there was no correction. thoughts?
When a mistake like this happens, many people think the most important thing for us to do is to correct it immediately. Unfortunately, that's too simplistic. My first responsibility is to minimize the harm caused by the mistake and to make sure that no additional harm occurs. In this particular case, the first thing we did was change the online story so that no one would have new access to that incorrect information. We then had to decide whether or not the mistake needed to be corrected on air. If someone had been directly hurt by the mistake, I would have consulted with that person to see how he/she wished for me to proceed. Not everyone wants a correction put on the air; sometimes a correction will call more attention to an issue than the actual story itself. In this case, since no one was directly hurt I had to weigh the need for the correction against the risk of muddying the waters on a very important issue. The point of the story wasn't how many cases there were in the US each year??the point was that this does happen and if you are an athlete you need to know how to recognize the warning signs of an attack. Recognizing those signs could save your life. One of the weaknesses of television news is that viewers only get one chance to hear a story correctly; they can't go back and make sure they heard it right. I decided that if I ran a correction on this small fact in the story, many viewers might have jumped to the conclusion that the entire story was incorrect. That was a conclusion that could possibly put their lives at risk. I'll admit the odds of that happening are slim, but I do think that risk did offset the need to publicly correct the mistake. I did correct it in every medium where I could correct it without the risk of confusion.
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