Media
Michael Kinsley Hacks Away at the State of the Correction
We here at Unfit would like to think that we avoid hackery. Of course, in this day and age — what with “satisfy instant demand” being the watchphrase for the news business — it can be kind of hard to totally dodge the posting of efforts from the … less-than-graceful side of things. So we also like to think that we can understand when some hack (veteran journo or no) finds his or her way to the electronic folds of a major daily publication. But, if this hack should, in the process of proving his or her ineptitude, also undermine the credibility of their publication, we’d further like to think that this makes them fair fucking game.
Take the Washington Post’s Michael Kinsley for example. In his most recent column (the one that ran on Friday, September 4), he used his op-ed space to point out the ridiculousness that one can find when they spend a few minutes in the Corrections section of the New York Times. Fine. Corrections can come off like the worst of the nerdlinger semantic debates. And if he’d stuck to the cutting and pasting of tortured errata columns, Kinsley would still only be a hack. But then something told him that he should try and make a bigger issue out of all of this. So he did: “The fad for elaborate and abject corrections, and factual accuracy in general, is based on the misperception that when people complain about the media getting it all wrong, what bothers them is [a lack of accuracy],” he writes. Fad for factual accuracy in general? Even as newspapers have long tinted their coverage in order to advance the political agenda of their publishers or to bring in the readers, it’s always been done under the cover of factual reporting. Which is to say that calling factual accuracy a fad is kind of like calling William Randolph Hearst a journalist.
Worse, though he’s probably correct in his assumption that the general public cares more about “the refusal of the Times and other papers to call President Obama a socialist or a Muslim, or to say outright that talk radio hosts are vermin,” Kinsley’s completely missed the point. Corrections are run, yes, superficially, to make amends to the record. And because they appear in the paper, they might seem to exist solely for the purpose of being a public mea culpa and factual amendment. That is until you actually think about it for more than 30 seconds. The correction is the best bit of tangible evidence of the implied contract that should, even in these bloggy times, keep journalists honest. To be corrected is fucking shameful, and, for any self-respecting journalist, the fear of ending up on that page is strong enough to, if all else fails, keep you doing good work. Kinsley’s flip treatment of corrections and — seriously? I mean, really … — facts is totally perplexing.
That it ended up in the pages (even if they are of the op-ed sort) of one of the more respected dailies on the face of the planet is an embarrassment. There are hacks, and then there are hacks. And then there’s Michael Kinsley.
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One Comment
You could make your point just as well, if not better, without the swear words. They just make you come off as a zealot idiot.
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