Even the then-Pulitzer-owned Post-Dispatch spent time and money to interrupt a press run to correct a story written about me in the early 1990's when I was PD at KIX104, many of the facts of which were simply drawn from whole cloth by the writer. Darrell McWhorter, who covered radio and tv for the paper, was an inveterate liar who made up facts and quotes to suit his agenda and he got caught because I made a lot of noise about it.
Most newspapers have a regular area in which they present corrections, and usually that's pages away from the area in which the first story appeared. Usually such corrections are about one or two items. Sadly, we've come to accept that a newspaper can accuse, for example, a man of abusing his wife on Page One and then, when the accusation is withdrawn or proved false, correct it in Section 3, Page 43.
But when a newspaper styles itself as the national paper of record, as does the New York Times, has to put forth a correction that involves a dozen facts, you have to sit up and take notice. Here's from their July 22 issue, about inaccuracies in their Walter Cronkite obit:
An appraisal on Saturday about Walter Cronkite's career included a number of errors. In some copies, it misstated the date that the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was killed and referred incorrectly to Mr. Cronkite's coverage of D-Day. Dr. King was killed on April 4, 1968, not April 30.
Mr. Cronkite covered the D-Day landing from a warplane; he did not storm the beaches. In addition, Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon on July 20, 1969, not July 26. "The CBS Evening News" overtook "The Huntley-Brinkley Report" on NBC in the ratings during the 1967-68 television season, not after Chet Huntley retired in 1970.
A communications satellite used to relay correspondents' reports from around the world was Telstar, not Telestar. Howard K. Smith was not one of the CBS correspondents Mr. Cronkite would turn to for reports from the field after he became anchor of "The CBS Evening News" in 1962; he left CBS before Mr. Cronkite was the anchor. Because of an editing error, the appraisal also misstated the name of the news agency for which Mr. Cronkite was Moscow bureau chief after World War II. At that time it was United Press, not United Press International.
No, newpapers are not dying because of the lack of ad sales, although the loss of income makes it tough to get on with the business of publishing.
The newspaper industry is fading away because those of us who used to be regular readers have finally figured out that what we read, either on their dead-tree editions or their websites, is just plain bullshit.
I'm talking about 45+'ers, not the under-45'ers, because no one is growing new newspaper readers. How many 20-somethings do you know who spread out the Sunday paper on their dining room table, with coffee and buns, and lazily read their way through it to the comics and the shoppers, as we did thirty years ago?
Correct answer: none.
The paper's agenda no longer interests us and their editing process is insufficient to allow us to trust what they write. That includes the NYT and it includes Lee Publishing and their pitiful products, including the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.
I apologize to my friends at the P-D for bringing this to light and I wish them the best in their future careers.
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