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

Craig Silverman (Author), Jeff Jarvis (Foreword)

Book Description

Publication Date: November 1, 2007

We regret the error: it’s a phrase that appears in newspapers almost daily, the standard notice that something went terribly wrong in the reporting, editing, or printing of an article. From Craig Silverman, the proprietor of www.RegretTheError.com, one of the Internet’s most popular media-related websites, comes a collection of funny, shocking, and sometimes disturbing journalistic slip-ups and corrections. On display are all types of media inaccuracy—from “fuzzy math” to “obiticide” (printing the obituary of a person very much alive and well) to complete and utter ethical lapses. While some of the errors can be laugh-out-loud funny, the book contains a sobering journey through the history of media mistakes (including the outrageous hoaxes that dominated newspapers during the circulation wars of the 19th-century) and a serious muckraking investigation of contemporary journalism’s lack of accountability to the public. It shines a spotlight on the media’s carelessness and the sometimes tragic and calamitous consequences of weak or non-existent fact checking.

 

 

 

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Blogger Silverman is a man obsessed with pointing out the mistakes of others, though he dreams of a world in which he didn't have to. If media outlets printed their own corrections more thoroughly, amending online content appropriately, embracing their mistakes wholeheartedly, he argues, he wouldn't have to collect and publicize them with such devotion. Having founded regrettheerror.com to tally inaccuracies and corrections in the press, Silverman has set out to chronicle and categorize these errors in his first book. The result is a winding journey through the most glaring, damaging and humorous typos, misprints, misidentifications, fuzzy numbers and obiticides in the history of journalism, from the accidental to the malicious. These chapters are chock-full of amusing historical anecdotes, including the story behind the incorrect headline Dewey Defeats Truman, the case of mistaken identity that galvanized Nobel to create his prestigious awards, and the oft-presumed dead but still living Abe Vigoda. Silverman injects plenty of humor, but mostly he is deeply concerned about the science of journalism, and at the heart of this romp is an argument for increased public participation in the news cycle. (Nov.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

About the Author

Craig Silverman is a journalist and founder of RegretTheError.com, a compilation of media errors that receives tens of thousands of visitors monthly. Jeff Jarvis is a media critic and proprietor of buzzmachine.com. --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 384 pages
• Publisher: Union Square Press (November 1, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1402751532
• ISBN-13: 978-1402751530
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.9 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,443,167 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Thorough and nuanced, November 26, 2007

By 

Walter Neary "wneary1" (Lakewood, WA USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Regret the Error: How Media Mistakes Pollute the Press and Imperil Free Speech (Hardcover)

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.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Much more than the cover suggests, November 2, 2008

By 

Michael Jones (Melbourne, Australia) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Regret the Error: How Media Mistakes Pollute the Press and Imperil Free Speech (Hardcover)

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!