Craig Silverman’s book Regret the Error contains a maze of a correction that simply corrects an incorrect correction. You can also follow more recent collections of corrections on his blog at the Poynter Institute. This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “A Correction Correcting A Correction”
I have another newspaper correction for you, Grant.
Okay.
This is again from the book Regret the Error by Craig Silverman. It’s a classic from a Canadian newspaper. It goes,
The Ottawa Citizen and Southam News wish to apologize for our apology to Mark Stein, published October 22nd. In correcting the incorrect statements about Mr. Stein published October 15th, we incorrectly published the incorrect correction.
We accept and regret that our original regrets were unacceptable, and we apologize to Mr. Stein for any distress caused by our previous apology.
I read that he had a hand in that correction. I must have, because somebody had a ball with that.
Yeah. Clearly they had some fun there.
I don’t think corrections are supposed to be fun, are they?
No, sometimes they’re awful.
You didn’t win the lottery.
No, that really happened.
Oh, really?
Yeah, yeah.
Oh, they misprinted the lottery numbers.
Yes.
Oh, wow.
Yeah, I mean, sometimes it can be really painful.
Oh, that’s terrible.
Yeah.
