ACCURACY: DEAD MAN WALKS

There was a bumper crop of apologies for mistakes made published in the Times of Swaziland yesterday (31 October 2007)

In the worst of their mistakes they killed off former Minister of Public Works and Transport, Titus Mlangeni.

As Mark Twain once said, ‘Reports of my death have been exaggerated.’ It was in fact Mlangeni’s wife who had recently passed away.

In another apology the Times gave the wrong name for the recently deceased former Speaker of the House of Assembly. They called him Dlamini when he was in fact a Nsibande.

The ‘newspaper’ scored a hat trick of apologies with this correction, ‘It has been brought to our attention that the article under the heading ‘PM given a week to table report in Parliament’ was incorrect. The MPs voted on the issue and the motion was thrown out.’

I applaud the Times' honesty for apologising for these errors, but the mistakes should not have happened in the first place. All three are the most basic types of errors a reporter can make: getting a name wrong, getting the result of a vote wrong … and killing off a perfectly healthy man.

The result of all this must surely be that readers cannot trust what they see in the Times. How can we know that even the most basic of information published in the newspaper is accurate?

This isn’t the first time the Times has got it wrong and the Times is not the only newspaper to publish inaccurate stories. Who can forget the grovelling apology the Times Sunday had to make after it incorrectly reported 20,000 people died while being treated as patients at Mbabane Government Hospital in 2006?


Then there was the time the Swazi Observer had to apologise to the principal of Waterford Kamhlaba private school for reporting incorrectly that pupils had been hospitalised after taking illegal drugs.

Article one of the Swaziland National Association of Journalists (SNAJ) Code of Ethics states that the duty of every journalist is to write and report, adhere to and faithfully defend the truth. It goes on to state that a journalist should make adequate inquiries, do cross checking of facts in order to provide the public with unbiased, accurate, balanced and comprehensive information.

Getting things right is important because readers must feel that they can trust their newspapers (or other news media). The main way they do this by having confidence that the reports and articles in the newspapers are accurate. Large numbers of people read and trust newspapers. The SNAJ Code of Ethics recognises that journalists have a duty not to mislead the public.

There have been many academic studies into the relationship between media accuracy and credibility. Put simply, the more errors there are in an article, the less credible is the news story. Errors not only diminished respect for the newspaper but also tarnish the media’s working relationships with the sources relied upon for information. If sources of news cannot trust the newspaper to get it right, they are unlikely to willingly work with that newspaper in the future.

Editors of newspapers should make sure that reporters check their facts and do not make mistakes. One newspaper, the Sunday Times in Johannesburg, has a checklist that reporters and editors are asked to complete for each report. The checklist covers a number of areas, including basic information such as the names and ages etc., of people included in the report. It also includes questions about fairness, such as whether all people parties involved in the story have been contacted.

The checklist can be seen here