We regret the error (just like Ian Davey!)

I've been offline and out of Ottawa for a few days — a family member has had a serious medical situation and I wanted to give that my full attention — and am just catching up on Twitter, Facebook, e-mail, and so on now.

So let's see what's in the electronic inbox …

Oh, there's this: Some bloggers (along with several of the readers that Michael Ignatieff's former top aide, over the weekend, called illiterate and stupid) found an error in one of my stories from last week. I am, as always, grateful to any and all for pointing out any error I've made and have asked for it to be corrected. The error was mine and no one else's and, once alerted to the error, the editors of our Web sites immediately updated it. A correction will be sent along to our papers for their use. (But just back to Ian Davey for a minute: Was he calling me stupid? I'm confused. Though, confused or not, I rather like that DiManno gal in the Star!)

In the case at hand, I was reporting on the parting of ways of Tom Clark and CTV. The CTV biography noted that Clark had reported on just about every federal election since 1974. I took that data point from CTV and re-worked it to say he had reported on every election since Pierre Trudeau beat Joe Clark in 1974. I thought that using the names of the two principal rivals in that contest would be more evocative of the era than simply saying “in 1974”. By now, though, you've surely seen the “embarrassing mistake” (as one twit called it) that The Toronto Star's Antonia Zerbisias gleefully re-tweeted to all of her followers: Trudeau did not beat Clark in 1974, he beat Robert Stanfield that year. (Clark would take his whupping from Trudeau in 1980).

Now I – and everyone who's ever had a byline in a newspaper anywhere (please see the tremendously entertaining Regret the Error) — have made plenty of mistakes in my career writing for The Globe and Mail, National Post, the Hamilton Spectator and my other stops along the way. Of course, I wish I'd never made any mistakes. (But I am proud to report that, in more than 25 years in the biz now, I've never been accused of misquoting someone. So that's something.) That said: apparently, neither Antonia Z. nor the Star have ever made an error so Antonia, of course, is free to throw all the stones she wants at the Sun's glass house.

But back to this “embarrassing mistake”. As even BigCityLib admits, this is a bit of a “cheap gotcha”. The error in question — that Trudeau beat Stanfield in '74 not Clark — doesn't at all change the basic point I was trying to make — that Tom Clark has been around one helluva long time — and it's in the second-last paragraph of the piece! If this is the most egregious mistake I and Sun Media make, then we would consider ourselves blessed. I say that not to dismiss the error or avoid responsibility for it but only to encourage those who keep an eye on the mainstream media to do so because it's important in and of itself. Democracy is best served with a lively and healthy independent press — held to account by engaged and committed readers and viewers.