INACCURACY: SOURCES SPEAK OUT

A row between a school in Mbabane and the Swazi Observer gives us an interesting insight into the accuracy of news reporting in the kingdom.

The Observer published a front-page story (9 August 2007) in which it claimed that four senior boys at Waterford Kamhlaba private school had been hospitalised after taking illicit drugs.

The following day in a humiliating climb down the newspaper published a ‘right to reply’ from the school’s principal.

In the reply, the principal identified four main areas of error in the original news report. The Observer admitted that the news report had misquoted him and had taken information and quotes from another source but attributed them to the principal. It also admitted that it had confused quotes from students and made them sound as if they came from an official school spokesman. It also turned out that the students had not taken illicit drugs but had drunk tea made with the flowers of the moonflower plant and had become sick, unaware of the poisonous nature of the plant.

As I have written before it is important for journalists to be accurate in their reporting because readers must feel they can trust what’s in the newspaper. In this case the principal’s confidence in the Observer is now so low that he has stated that he will not speak to the paper’s reporters in future. At best, he will make comments to the newspaper in writing only, so that his words are not distorted.

What we as readers cannot know is how often gross distortions of information are published in Swazi newspapers. We know about this particular case because the source at its centre is an educated person who knows how to complain to the newspaper’s editor. He complained and his ‘right to reply’ was immediately published. But, how many uneducated and ignorant people get badly reported in newspapers but never know how to complain?

There is some academic research that gives us an insight into how often newspapers make mistakes. Philip Meyer surveyed people who had been used by newspapers in the United States as sources in news stories. Meyer wanted to find out from these news sources how accurate they thought the reports were.

Meyer also asked the sources why they thought errors happened.

The main reason given by sources, when asked to judge why the reporter made a mistake, was simply that the reporter didn’t understand what he or she was writing about.

Here are the top seven reasons for errors and the percentages of sources that named them:

1. Reporters didn’t fully understand the story - 29%.

2. Pressure to get the story done on time - 23%.

3. Not enough research - 16%.

4. Events surrounding the story were very confusing - 15%.

5. Laziness on the part of the news staff - 12%.

6. Reporter didn't ask enough questions - 12%.

7. Reporter didn't ask the right questions - 12%.

In his study, Meyer puts errors in three categories: Objective (misspelled name), Subjective (out of context, exaggerated, sensationalized), Maths (percentages, etc.)

Of the more than 5,100 stories Meyer examined, 21 per cent had an objective error, 18 per cent a maths error and 53 per cent a subjective error. Interestingly, the sources for these stories were more likely to forgive a subjective error, thinking that the reporter was either too dimwitted or too biased to get it right, than a maths error. After all, maths is factual, and if you can’t get the facts right than how can you get the context right?

For more details of this research see Tim Porter’s essay First Draft here