Corrections Are the Only Honest Metric
Every outlet claims accuracy. The correction record is the one measure that cannot be produced by a marketing department.
Trust in the press is measured constantly and almost always through surveys, which capture how people feel about a category rather than how a particular outlet performs.
There is a better measure and it is sitting in plain sight. An outlet's correction record shows how often it gets things wrong, how quickly it acknowledges it, and whether it treats a correction as an obligation or an embarrassment to be minimized.
The comparison is unflattering in a specific way. Outlets that publish many corrections are usually the ones with the most rigorous checking, because a process that catches errors after publication is generally attached to one that catches most of them before. An outlet with no corrections is either extraordinary or is not looking.
The practice worth demanding is simple: corrections on the page, dated, describing what was wrong rather than that something was, and never a silent edit. It costs nothing except the willingness to be seen being wrong, which is exactly why it is a real signal.
Peter Osei-Bonsu writes for The 13th Bell on media. This piece was edited and fact checked before publication.
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