Ok, this isn’t part 6 of any series, but I’ve written about this almost ad nauseum in previous blogs. I have this feeling that one day I will have a job title that includes the word “editor”, or perhaps more likely, “fact checker”. I think I should start keeping a notebook of all the errors, factual and otherwise, that regularly show up in publications I regularly read, publications which should be able to afford a decent fact checker or editor. I could make more than a few newspapers look a bit more respectable and less error-ridden if only they’d pay me enough to get me to leave my current job.
There’s the Daily Commercial Record, which is barely worthy of being called a newspaper it’s so shoddy. How it has managed to stay in existence for 120 years I can’t begin to guess. Among their many lowlights from the past year are the following two:
- During the campaign for the Democratic Party’s Presidential nomination, they once referred to John Edwards as “the senator from South Carolina” (emphasis added), which I’m sure would have shocked Lindsey Graham and Jim DeMint. Edwards is actually a (not “the”) former senator from North Carolina.
- A few weeks ago in an article that mentioned Mitt Romney as a possible running mate for John McCain, it said that he had run the 2002 Winter Olympics in Denver. The 2002 Olympics were in Salt Lake City.
The Dallas Morning News is a regular offender, but in today’s GuideLive (read: entertainment) section they had an article with an error so basic and egregious I was genuinely angry after reading it. The article was an obituary for LeRoi Moore, the saxophonist for the Dave Matthews Band. He had been seriously injured in an ATV accident on June 30th, and on Tuesday of this week he died of complications from those injuries. The band’s summer tour had already begun at the time he got hurt, so Jeff Coffin had been filling in for him and will probably continue to do so now that Moore has died.
The sentence that so upset me was near the end of the story when Coffin was mentioned: “Saxophonist Jeff Coffin, who played with Béla Fleck and the Flecktones, had been sitting in for Mr. Moore during the band’s summer tour, which included a show Saturday at Frisco’s Pizza Hut Park.” That Saturday concert was actually held at the Superpages.com Center in Dallas.
Now I could perhaps understand the error if they had previously booked the former venue and changed to the latter, or if perhaps they had played at Pizza Hut Park in previous years (they never have; they have played at the Superpages.com Center on pretty much every tour for the past 7 years), or if the concert in question had been several months before and the writer’s memory was foggy. In any of those cases it still would have been sloppy writing and research, but it would be a far sight more understandable than screwing up a basic fact about a concert that happened five days ago.
Those two venues aren’t even remotely similar or close together, in fact they’re 32 miles apart. It couldn’t have been a case of confusing one for the other. They’re not exactly next door to each other or just down the street. That’s like mentioning a concert in Houston and saying it took place in Galveston, or like a baseball team having Los Angeles in its name when it plays in a stadium 30 miles away in Anaheim. (Oh wait! Bad example. And yes I realize my Dallas Cowboys are building their new stadium in Arlington, which isn’t even close enough to be a suburb of Dallas).
To avoid that error, all the writer had to do was check the band’s touring website, or last weekend’s entertainment section, or Ticketmaster, or HIS OWN NEWSPAPER’S SUNDAY EDITION. It really wasn’t that hard. But he probably either relied on his own faulty memory or used the questionable fact-checking technique of asking the co-worker in the next desk over. I’m serious, he could have called DMB “a boring has-been act” or Dave Matthews “a no-talent hack who employs musicians far superior to himself” or something similarly demeaning and I wouldn’t have been nearly as upset as I was about a newspaper with the circulation and budget of the Dallas Morning News printing an error so obvious, so easily avoided within a simple mouse click to Ticketmaster, so egregious that it painted a picture of a writer either too lazy to get something right or offensively indifferent to the memory of the man he was writing about.
It’s a silly thing to be upset about, I suppose, but it wasn’t a simple typo; it was an outright error and it angered me in ways that I can’t adequately explain. There are days when I think the Dallas Morning News isn’t worth the paper it’s printed on, or even the plastic bags it’s recycled into. This was definitely one of those days.
