We were wrong but you are still wronger!
Raju Narisetti -
Tuesday, December 16, 2008 3:02 PM
Being a believer in newspapers having a clearly articulated and transparent corrections and clarifications policy, this Romantic Realist was delighted to see Hindustan Times promote a very prominent Clarifications/Corrections column that asks readers to alert htreporters@hindustantimes.com for any "bloomer" in the paper and promising that the paper is "happy to correct ourselves." ((Regular readers of Mint, where the Romantic Realist has a day job, are probably familiar with its permanent Page 2 Corrections & Clarifications box stemming from a clearly stated Code of Conduct that lets readers know how to flag errors and how the paper corrects its errors.))
The Hindustan Times decision to prominently display such a column was somewhat tempered, however, by a recent example of what is known as "correction-as-weapon" tactic where a "correction has been used both as a means to acknowledge an error and land one more jab at a source's expense," a tactic well chronicled by Craig Silverman in his 2007 book, Regret The Error. (Checkout Silverman's website here)
Here is how it all played out.
On 2 December, Hindustan Times published a provocative story (read the full story online here) after the Mumbai terrorist attacks headlined "Buried in the rubble, ten questions." Among the questions was this one at No. 5:
5. A day after the terrorist attack and casualties at the CST Railway Station, why did Sumana Raghavan fly down to New Delhi and party at Taj Palace hotel with Railway Board colleagues?
That question prompted AK Saxena, additional director general (PR) of the Central Railway to write a 139-word letter to Hindustan Times saying, among other things: "Question 5 is not based on facts and is unjust, unfair and misleading. When the terrorist attack took place at CST station on November 26, Sowmya Raghavan, then General Manager of Central Railway, was present in Mumbai and was continuously monitoring the situation...Immediately after the attack, she visited CST and guided rescue and relief operations. She visited the injured in hospitals and met family members of the dead...In the article, even her name was wrongly spelt as 'Sumana Raghavan'. The statement that she attended a party at Taj hotel in Delhi is totally incorrect and baseless."
Ideally, one would imagine that the honorable thing for a newspaper to do at this stage would be to simply acknowledge and correct any errors.
So what did Hindustan Times do? In a 210-word response, the reporter on the story began by saying:
"We regret that the name of Ms. Soumya Raghavan was misspelt in the story. We have also not disputed that she was in Mumbai on the night the attacks began. As the story mentioned, the party in her honour was held the next day in New Delhi, at the Mumtaz Mahal hall of the Taj Palace hotel. However, we regret reporting incorrectly that she was also present that night."
So far so good. End of the mea culpa? Apparently, not really. Here is what the reporter got to then add, among other things:
"The point of the story is not to make a personal attack on one official..."
Ok, fair enough. End of story? Apparently not really, really. Here is what the reporter got to add again to the now lengthy rejoinder, now 178 words longer than the original Questions No 5:
"Even in the aftermath of the terrorist attack at the railway station, she left behind a headless set-up..."
I don't know about you but sounds like a "personal attack" to me that had nothing to do with the original story or the errors to be corrected.
Here to your right is how the entire saga looked on the page. 
As Silverman writes in his book: "The phenomenon of the correction-as-weapon is both amusing and troubling. A correction should by all means read as though a human wrote it, but journalists should resist the urge to turn corrections into parlor tricks or platforms for airing personal gripes."
Amen.
Ps: HT Media, which publishes Hindustan Times, also publishes Mint