That’s the risk they take when they choose to use confidential sources (they can’t break their promise, they would have never gotten that info if they would not have agreed to confidentiality). If you are talking about regular sources, there are such things as retractions (if they believe their prior report was in error).

re: “Why doesn’t every news organization have a wiki for every fact that they know (going forward…)?

for many good reasons, I suspect… (not divulging the info to competitors is the first that comes to mind)

Delia

One nuance, remember, is that if a reporter changes his assessment from “mostly confident in X” to “less confident in X” or “no longer confident in X” does that mean that the first statement is wrong?

Why doesn’t every news organization have a wiki for every fact that they know (going forward…)? Why, I suppose, is that the blog-evangelists have sold them on marketing value in blogging, more than the constructive value of wikis.

–> I think this is *potentially* conspiracy to deceive the public (but just… potentially…) D.

Jon, I think this was the real problem and a database that tracks errors couldn’t expose confidential sources any more than ABS can just came out and do it now (if it wants to still use confidential sources in the future).

Delia

Yes, indeed. That’s how it could work.
Maybe somebody’s working on it. Since no one’s volunteering an answer here, I’ll inquire within the Online News Association list.

Would it have prevented the original problem?
Well, do bug databases prevent all computer defects?
And do public disclosure laws prevent political favoritism?
etc.
one can hope, that’s all.

I don’t know.
Anyways, Dan G. and Dan K. have moved on; and Greenwald’s on vacation this week, and besides, his interest in this morphed into his general interest in unraveling the case against Ivins.

Another day, another tempest of outrage, and we yet wait for tools like a Publisher Error Database to be built.

Jon

“giving the readers the option to sign up for email updates if they would like to be informed if and when the error would go into the database”

should read:

“giving the readers the option to sign up for email updates if they would like to be informed if and when *any error* would go into the database”

Delia

P.S. But this would not have prevented the major problem in the situation we are talking about, would it? D.

I’m glad you asked. Around four years ago, there was a much more obvious screw-up at a national news network. One effect was that Dan Rather lost his job. Another was that the network launched the “Public Eye” blog to “bring transparency to the editorial operations of CBS News.” It featured — who else — in its inaugural guest blog post.

But few of the evangelists realized how it was set up to fail: “…Public Eye, led by its editor, will not be The Judge of Virtue at CBS News and will not issue Edicts and Pronouncements about what is acceptable or praiseworthy journalism and what is not.” In other words, it could have just done its job as a public editor. Instead, it wanted to join the blog-eat-blog world of just trying to appear original through passing on thrice-chewed blog fodder.

And, last December, the Public Eye ceased updating. A CBS spokesman told TVNewser: “We weren’t able to find a sustainable business model for Public Eye.”

There was another, more humble suggestion from 2005 by way of Scott Rosenberg. A news organization should simply have an error database where they track complaints and bugs, just like a software project. The pitfall is that no one came up with a catchy name for it. (So call it a P.E.D. — Published Error Database)

It wouldn’t necessarily have a “business model”, but it would be the right thing to do. And that’s what’s so sad.

Gosh, if the NYT canned its Public Editor role, you’d hear it from here to Broadway (um, that’d be where the 3 J-schools in Manhattan are). But because the P. Eye was never established as an ombuds/bugtracking site, no one is mourning its loss.

And *again* rolling back the calendar all those years, imagine if the citmedia boosters had told the journosaurs: “Well, a blog will just devolve into marketing fluff and navel-gazing. You really need a PED, and we media-reformer-academics will help you build them and will keep score on how aggressively you use it.” But that’s not how it happened.

“And despite continued White House denials, four well-placed and separate sources have told ABC News that initial tests on the anthrax by the US Army at Fort Detrick, Maryland, have detected trace amounts of the chemical additives bentonite and silica.”

–> I think this is *potentially* conspiracy to deceive the public (but just… potentially…) D.

I believe that Dan Kennedy got to the heart of it here:

“Somehow we were supposed to know that ABC had shifted from We’re sticking by our story despite White House denials to We’re retracting our story because of White House denials.”

Certainly today (and for much of the last 35 years), a “White House denial” was taken as something to be interpreted as a truism, but I suppose in 2001 Brian Ross and ABC felt that a White House denial really should be taken at face value.