98% of US Newspapers Don't Correct Their Errors

Almost half of the articles published by daily newspapers in the US contain one or more factual errors, and less than two per cent end up being corrected.

The findings are from a forthcoming research paper by Scott R Maier, an associate professor at the University of Oregon’s School of Journalism and Communication. The findings challenge how well journalism’s “corrections box” sets the record straight or serves as a safety valve for the venting of frustrations by wronged news sources.

The average US newspaper should expand by a factor of 50 the amount of space given to corrections, says Scott R Maier’s research. Maier, an associate professor at the University of Oregon’s School of Journalism and Communication, describes in a research paper his findings that fewer than 2 per cent of factually flawed articles are corrected at dailies.

The study’s central finding is sobering: 98 per cent of the 1,220 factual newspapers errors examined went uncorrected. The correction rate was uniformly low for each of the 10 newspapers studied, with none correcting even 5 per cent of the mistakes identified by news sources. While it is not plausible or arguably even desirable for every newspaper error to be detected and corrected, Maier noted, the study shows that the corrections box represents the “tip of the iceberg” of mistakes made in a newspaper, therefore providing only a limited mechanism for setting the record straight.