The ruins of Troy and other journalistic errors

“The man who reads nothing at all is better educated than the man who reads nothing but newspapers” – Thomas Jefferson

A piece published today in La Tercera, page 66, trends section, informs us that the walls of Troy were 8 meters high and 4 meters long. 4 meters long? That really was a miniature city! Surely the writer of the piece was trying to express the width of the walls.

A slip, a minor detail, you’ll tell me, but can you imagine if King Priam had commissioned a wall barely 4 meters long? Homer would have been left without a subject for his epic poem, and Achilles would be remembered as a neighborhood bully.

Yesterday the same newspaper published a piece about the terror of mathematics we all suffer from. Well, I’m not afraid of mathematics, so I suppose the journalist who wrote that piece must be talking about her personal experience and generalizing, as journalists tend to do lately (the “post-Google journalists”, as my son calls them; he is a journalism student who carries the burden of having me as his editor in the shadows :wink: ).

I’m not going to analyze in depth the problem with that piece (page 12 of the trends supplement of November 17). Just consider that it confuses symptom with cause, but it’s not the scientists who make the mistake; the problem lies with the writer of the popular-science piece.

Thanks to one of my readers I received a reference to the book The Universal Journalist, by David Randall. As my correspondent says, a book every journalist should read.

According to Randall the most common errors in the press are of these 6 types:

• Errors of detail: names, ages, addresses, etc.

• Narrative errors: one part of the story is false, even though the rest is correct

• Hoaxes and inventions: the whole piece is false

• Errors of context: background information is missing, or is wrong, which makes the account inaccurate

• Errors of omission: a story becomes misleading because a part is left out

• Errors of interpretation: adding two and two and getting five

And the eleven thirteen causes of these errors are (*):

• False information from sources

• Poor note-taking

• Not checking the facts with the sources

• Wishing something were true

• Reluctance to check “sensational” facts or events

• Not reading the story once it is written

• Trusting websites too much

• Ignoring our own misgivings

• Omitting facts that don’t fit a preconceived theory (or one conceived too quickly)

• Going to press too soon

• Not consulting specialists on technical subjects

• Excessive trust in archive material

• Production errors, unintentional errors, introduced by copy editors or editors, for example

This model of Randall’s seems quite reasonable to me, and if you notice, it also applies to those of us who write a blog, and even to other fields (I’m thinking of requirements gathering).

The important thing, I think, is to acknowledge our mistakes, and to try to bring the greatest honesty to our work of informing the public, whether we are “bloggers” or journalists (all the more so).