Regret the Error: How Media Mistakes Pollute the Press and Imperil Free Speech

This is an excellent and thorough essay on media accuracy. Unfortunately its dust jacket does a massive disservice to it by suggesting that it's just a bunch of funny corrections. This book deserves a lot more attention than that!

This is a book that should be read by anyone involved in media production and anyone who is ever written about by the media. Unfortunately, the dust jacket might scare off serious people. The subhead "How Media Mistakes Pollute the Press and Imperil Free Speech" makes it sound like the book is about media bashing. And the excerpts on the back cover contain mostly humorous corrections (such as one from Oregon, "A headline on Page One should have made clear that Oregon Health and Science University will be studying the effects of meth, not cooking it"). Ho, ho, chuckle, but ... the book's appearance makes it come off like either a collection of humorous excerpts or yet another book that bashes the media for being liberal or conservative or whatever. But that's not what the book is. In fact, this book is thoughtful and nuanced about the history and consequences and explanations of media error. If you pair it with The Vanishing Newspaper by Meyer, you have a real glimpse of the media, warts and all, that my generation sure could have used when we all had visions of Woodward and Bernstein dancing in our heads way back when. Sure, reporters will find the book painful to read. They'll worry what their sources think, and sources may be too quick to chortle at the humanity of media production. Yet this paragraph from page 59 is an example of the author's mastery of the subject and leads to some conclusions that both reporters and sources can agree on: "Working under deadlines causes errors, as do the technologies used by reporters every day; and the newspaper system whereby a story goes from a reporter to an editor and onward until it reaches the page-layout and printing stage is rife with weaknesses and opportunities for error. Yet any blame is laid solely at the feet of the person seen as being directly responsible - to the complete exclusion of the process that contributed to the error. Every stage in the production of a newspaper, broadcast, or other news product is designed with some controls to prevent error, and yet each of these stages also has the ability to introduce or even force errors..." This book will improve anyone's understanding of how the media really works, or doesn't work, at times.