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.

On Track: The Washington City Paper's Coverage of the D.C. Metro Crash Rolls On

Let’s apply the grief cycle to the demise of print journalism.

Denial: The Internet? Who needs the Internet?

Anger: No WAY can unprincipled basement dwellers trump established media.

Bargaining: Okay, maybe it’s a good idea to get involved in this thing. But look, we’re only going to put what goes in the paper on our homepage.

Depression: Remember back before the Internet when journalism was great and everything was beautiful?

Acceptance: Who needs staff writers when we can hire unpaid interns?!

Thankfully, this mess is now old news: Newspapers are sinking or doggie-paddling, which means that those of us who care about them can move on to thinking about the future. And if the coverage of this past week’s D.C. Metro Disaster offered by the Washington City Paper (full disclosure: I’ve spent some serious time writing and working with these folks) is any indication of what that might be, things may just turn out alright.

The big question facing CP and it’s alt-weekly kin (now that the Craigslist debacle may have been somewhat reversed) is one of coverage: Pre-digital-times, these papers set themselves up as the counterintuitive, in-depth alternative to drab mainstream coverage. There and then, when the six-week hangout, 10,000 word cover story was an expected anchor, alts could beat their daily competitors by offering a flavor of nose-to-the-ground that more regular deadlines couldn’t dependably allow for. As the e-need for immediacy began to outweigh the stuff of feature-driven journalism (check out this super-prescient article from Ted Koppel), mainstream outlets could, even as they resisted the change, bring the full force of their daily-trained newsrooms to bear on delivering instant news-ish updates. Alt-weeklies, which had always been tooled toward deeper, longer thinking, found themselves strapped for content.

Experiments ensued. Blogs. Sex columns. Other such bunk.

It took a true catastrophe to remind at least one former Alt powerhouse of where it’s strength lay. As reports started to come out about what would become the deadliest accident in Metro history, CP had reporters furiously dropping posts. There were on-scene updates and photos, prompt reporting of death counts (and when the Washington Post failed to accurately update these, prompt criticism of that paper), wide-ranging coverage (including a really nice, early read of NTSB safety documents by Mike DeBonis) and live-blogging of multiple press conferences that provided both blow-by-blow and instant analysis.

In other words, to best the Post in the instant-coverage department, CP went back to its roots. Its reporters hit the city, stuck their noses to the ground, and came up with some excellent coverage. Of course, the real test will come as things calm down — and CP will have to decide if it’s going to use the lessons learned from Monday’s disaster for the doldrums of, say, summer in D.C.

Here’s hoping …