The Correction

The reporter protested. The story had been accurate, he said. The source was credible. The editors had signed off.

The corrections editor had found three factual errors. Not large ones. A name misspelled. A date wrong by two years. A quote that didn’t match the recording.

The reporter said corrections would make the paper look bad. The corrections editor said inaccuracy already had.

The correction ran on page A2 the next morning.

This happened again four months later, with a different reporter. And again six months after that. Each time, the corrections editor found the error, documented it, and ran the correction regardless of who the reporter was or how long they’d been at the paper.

She was corrections editor for eleven years. She ran 847 corrections.

She didn’t count them. Her successor found the number in the archives.

He kept the same policy. Not because he was told to. Because he’d read every correction she’d run and understood, line by line, what it meant to say in public: we were wrong.