Why don't T&T media professionals check facts?

Since leaving T&T about seven years ago, I've been relying mostly on T&T daily newspapers’ websites to keep abreast of local news.  Before leaving, I never used their websites; I preferred poring over the physical newspapers instead.  My transfer from the physical to the online versions of the news had an interesting side-effect: spotting errors is easier.

I'm not talking just about typos, or more correctly typographical errors, which include incorrect use of grammar and poor spelling.  These have been around for some time in the T&T media, I guess. Otherwise the late Undine Giuseppi wouldn't have been able to sustain her long-running English language column.  I've complained to the editors of both these dailies about this several times over the past few years, to little or no avail.  While egregious and frequent, typos can cause relatively little harm to the average reader.

No, I'm referring to the more dangerous kind: the factual errors.  These cover a range of forms.  I've observed simple ones, such as when reporters get the names of persons, organisations or events wrong.  For example, go search the websites for articles on the T&T men's cricket team's performance at the Airtel Twenty20 Champions League 2009 tournament. Several reporters kept calling it the IPL Champions League, when it was clearly not.  The IPL, or Indian Premier League, is a domestic cricket league in India and just one of the seven different leagues or countries worldwide represented at this Champions League tournament.

The medium range includes those that crop up especially in crime or accident stories.  For example, in a recent accident where a child died, one paper reported the child as being in the front seat, when the child was in the back seat, and the three daily papers disagreed on the names of the persons involved.  It prompted this safety call by Taran Rampersad.  I suspect these errors arise when the different reporters speak with different police officers or family members.  However, it means that as news consumers, we have to check two or three different newspapers to get an accurate story.

Then we have more complex ones, which mostly arise in articles written by reporters, who merely parrot whatever they've been told or observed without challenge, lies and statistics included.  As I’ll show below, journalists, who (hopefully) do a bit more research to confirm the veracity of what they write, aren't immune from making factual errors either.

I'm able to spot factual errors more frequently now, compared to when I read physical newspapers, because of one thing: the ease with which I can do research on the Internet.  I'll cite two examples from the Trinidad Guardian (if I had more time, I'd have found others from the Express or Newsday).

The first is Peter Balroop's story, entitled Cut ties with the US dollar, published on 26 Nov 2009. Peter reported on a business forum event hosted as part of this week's Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting (CHOGM).  Among other things, Peter wrote: ‘The advice came yesterday from Rahul Bajaj, a leading Indian industrialist who sits on the board of the New York Stock Exchange and is also on the board of the Harvard School of Business.  Bajaj, who is also a director on the Commonwealth Business Council, was however, unable to pinpoint a currency which could replace the US dollar, although he did mention the German mark as being in the running.’

On the face of it, everything seems correct.  However, some readers used the Guardian’s excellent online reader feedback tool to question the article's facts.  Rahul Bajaj is not listed as a current director of the NYSE.  His name also doesn’t appear on the Harvard Business School’s Board of Overseers, which has been in office since 04 Jun 2009.  The picture that accompanies the article doesn’t match those available on several websites for the chairman of the Bajaj Auto Group, whom Peter was quoting.  To top it off, “Mr Bajaj” mentioned the German mark as being in the running, but Germany replaced the mark with the euro as its currency on 01 Jan 1999!  Perhaps Peter didn’t do a background check on the speaker at the business forum because he expected CHOGM staff to do so, but why didn’t he question the guy’s reference to a retired currency?

The next article is Prior Beharry’s It’s getting warmer and warmer, also published on 26 Nov 2009.  This appears to be the first in a series on climate change, so I’d expect for such a topical issue at the moment, Prior would’ve been careful to provide facts and challenge anyone he quoted from.  As opposed to Peter’s report above, Prior should have followed stricter journalistic standards.  It appears he didn’t.

Prior quotes extensively from UWI Professor John Agard, who was reportedly one of the contributors to the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report, for which they shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize with Al Gore.  Prior quoted Prof Agard’s concerns about the rise in sea-level.  Maybe Prior doesn’t read columns posted in the Express.  If he did, he’d have seen articles by another widely-respected T&T scientist and UWI Professor, Julian Kenny, who questioned Prof Agard’s past comments about differing sea-level changes on T&T’s north and south coasts.  Even if he didn’t want to question Prof Agard on that, how about verifying the following quote: ‘Last year, Haiti got three or four Category Five hurricanes in a row.  “Unprecedented, this has never happened on the planet before in recorded history. Category Five Hurricanes are very rare, they are monster hurricanes,” Agard said.’

Now, if someone tells me we got three or four rare events in a row, I’d want to check that out, even if the source was recognised by the Nobel Committee.  Enter the US government’s National Weather Service’s National Hurricane Center.  There we may find historical summaries of all hurricanes.  I checked the records for 2008.  There were eight Atlantic hurricanes in 2008, and none of them hit Category 5.

In both of the above examples, it took less than ten minutes to confirm the existence of factual errors in the stories.  All I needed was a questioning mind and an Internet search engine.  So I wonder: is the public paying for accurate news or gossip when it buys our leading national papers?  To what extent should we rely on media personnel to check their facts before submitting articles?  Can’t media professionals – professional meaning competent – do the same fact checks that any reader with Internet access can?

There are other errors peculiar to their websites, such as:

• Articles referring to tables or diagrams that aren’t published online
• Tables being presented as unformatted text, making it difficult to tell what data is in which column, or what are the column headings
• Articles starting or ending mid-paragraph, or worse, mid-sentence
• Q&A columns that don’t give the name of the person being interviewed or outline their background
• Q&A columns which omit the Q and A, or fail to use bold text or colour, to differentiate between the questions and the answers
• Missing links to other articles on the Internet that were clearly referenced in the text (as experienced in Mark Lyndersay’s latest BitDepth column)
• The presence of strange non-English characters (most-often seen in the Express, especially in the Letters to the Editor)
• Missing bylines (so we can’t tell who wrote the article)
• Missing letter author names (not nom-de-plumes, I mean the names are actually missing, such as the Guardian’s Centre Stage letters).

I've informed them about several glaring errors, but no-one bothered to correct the online articles.  Don’t they realise that, unlike printed media, they can make changes to online articles and erase embarrassing errors?  After years of allowing these formatting, grammatical, typographical and factual errors to be published via their websites, do the editors of the T&T media care about the quality of their output?  If they do, why can’t they change their internal processes to reduce the amount of errors they publish?