I document uncorrected errors — history, geography, science and math — in leading media, and media's usually gross behaviors when asked for corrections. It's a big universe, so Utah and LDS Church errors are much less than 1 percent of my files. Still, Utahns can note how resolutely clueless some "top" media are about them.
In 2008, I paused my four-year Washington Post study to focus elsewhere. The last five Utah-related stories I saw, through Mitt Romney's run for president, all had errors, sampled below with the Post Co.'s Newsweek. This month, PBS repeated its four-hour 2007 documentary "The Mormons," by "Frontline" and "The American Experience." Faithful Mormons will grumble in "The Mormons," but I found no factual errors. Still, both series, arguably TV's best, register in my vast PBS files. "Frontline" alone among all major media, under former boss Lou Wiley, was consistently willing to correct errors and support my efforts.
But consider WETA, "the flagship public broadcasting station in the nation's capital," behind three major Ken Burns series, Jim Lehrer's "Newshour," Gwen Ifill's "Washington Week" and The Kennedy Center Presents. WETA's "Mormons" ad, heavily aired for each run, names "The Church of Latter-Day Saints." No "of Jesus Christ." It's a name, and the church changed its logo in 1995 to make Jesus' name predominant. WETA, as with all errors I ever reported to it, refused rational discussion, let alone correction.
And what says PBS itself in connection with "The Mormons"? I spent only 30 seconds scanning the intro at www.pbs.org/mormons/etc/synopsis.html. It identifies Dallin Oaks, who last week began his 27th year as one of the church's 12 apostles, simply as "elder of the Mormon Church" — a literally correct statement showing serious ignorance.
Reading maybe 15 percent of Newsweek for a year, I found it almost uniquely bad in error-egregiousness and zero corrections of logged errors. Newsweek's your mag for famous learned analysts spouting spectacular incompetence such as — a small sample — Hitler's invasion of the Soviet Union beginning in winter (Christopher Hitchens in a major cover story), North Dakota being too far north to grow wheat (science columnist Sharon Begley), the U.S. having 20,000 nuclear missiles aimed at the Soviet Union in 1960 (Fareed Zakaria, easily seen making other laughable errors).
Newsweek editor Jon Meacham, treated as cognoscente like these and many Posties, writes his own factual errors. His editing misses from those months also include Daniel Walker Howe, Pulitzer Prize historian of early 19th century America, saying (June 30, 2008) Joseph Smith was killed by lynching. Consensus is he was shot in Carthage Jail and fell out the window. While lynching's definition includes general mob violence, the term has specific imagery for most Americans that didn't apply to Smith's death.
And the Post? Thanks to well-known scandals and/or corporate woes in New York, Chicago and Los Angeles, it was America's top paper by default even before winning six 2008 Pulitzers (the New York Times took two), for 10 in three years. All these errors and several more just from those last five stories were uncorrected — like virtually all the thousand-odd Post errors I logged from just two or three hours weekly:
A Travel top feature said Salt Lake's Tabernacle "was built in 1875" (no, 1864-67) and the Salt Lake Temple "dates from the 1850s" (no; begun in the 1850s but re-started from scratch in 1862; just 20 feet high at Brigham Young's 1877 death; finished 1893). Another story claimed Summum's headquarters pyramid is "outside Salt Lake City." It's deep inside, scarcely an air mile from the Mormon Temple.
A Page 1 feature on Romney said, among other faults, "Now there are Mormon temples in more than 40 countries." No, 39 at the time — even counting temples under construction and in Taiwan and French Polynesia.
Facts are journalism's necessary basis, and no ethic is more basic than correcting errors. The Internet is killing traditional media, but they're killing themselves by failing to maintain better standards. It's telling that Wikipedia is more accurate than many "top" media — and certainly more correctable. Media criticism centers on alleged bias and personalities. But incompetence, never admitted, is more fundamental. And despite pious lies, hard factual errors virtually always go uncorrected, with outlets fanatically resisting corrections by any of 15-odd specific behaviors. My files are primary research on these realities.
Mark Powell lives in Arlington, Va. He has published general news analyses in nearly all the top 50 U.S. and many major Canadian newspapers. His "war on error," he reports, is much less popular.