CNN's Castro Obituary Blunder

CNN has fixed its copy by now, but in its initial reporting on the death of Cuban dictator Fidel Castro, it included a subjunctive phrase that will prove embarrassing. Noting that Castro had survived the administrations of eleven American presidents and outlived six of them, it added (in triple brackets) "NOTE: change to seven if George H.W. Bush dies before Castro."

CNN does not disappoint in its coverage of Fidel Castro's death. #standards #proofread pic.twitter.com/R2djaFfiQO

— Andrew Klavan (@andrewklavan) November 26, 2016

It's common that obituaries are prepared well in advance of the deaths of their subjects, but that doesn't mean they need not be reviewed by editors before publication.

Hat tip to Twitter user Andrew Klavan.

Historical howlers in Sunday's Washington Post Metro section

An article in the print edition of the Washington Post on Sunday, July 27 (p. C5), includes three glaring errors that would have resulted in a failing grade on an elementary school history test, yet only one of them has been subsequently corrected on the newspaper's web site.

The article, written by Ileana Najarro with a print-edition headline "Wolf is making his last push for holiday," explains how retiring U.S. Representative Frank Wolf (R-VA10) is advancing legislation that would make Washington's Birthday a federal holiday celebrated on the actual date of his birth, February 22, rather than floating each year on the third Monday in February.

One of Najarro's errors relates to how the holiday came to be celebrated on a date other than February 22:

President Rutherford B. Hayes established Washington’s birthday in 1879 as a holiday for the District’s federal workers, Wolf said. The holiday was extended to all federal workers six years later, but it wasn’t until 1971 that it was moved to the third Monday of February as part of President Gerald Ford’s Uniform Monday Holiday Act.

Gerald Ford did not become President until August 1974. The law was passed when Lyndon Johnson was President. Johnson signed it on June 28, 1968, and it took effect January 1, 1971, when Richard Nixon was President. Ford did sign a bill in 1975 that amended the Uniform Monday Holiday Act to restore Veterans' Day commemorations to November 11, regardless of its day of the week.

A second error, also not corrected, misplaces the origins of George Washington:

Sitting in his office, [Wolf] spoke of his geographical connection to the first president: Both were originally from Philadelphia, and both have held office in Winchester.

It used to be said that "every schoolboy knows" some fact about U.S. history. One such fact is that George Washington came from Virginia. He was born in the Northern Neck, in Westmoreland County near Fredericksburg. In later years, Washington made his home at Mount Vernon, just down the Potomac River from the city that bears his name. As a military officer, Washington did maintain an office in Winchester during the 1750s in a building that still stands near Cork and Braddock Streets.

Washington also served his country in Philadelphia, presiding over the Constitutional Convention in 1787 and moving there from New York as President before the capital was established in its present location.

The sole error that was corrected reads, in the print edition, like this:

Although the holiday is still recognized as Washington's Birthday, it's come to be known as Presidents' Day, with several states honoring all presidents at once. Wolf said he abhors this "hijacking" because Washington's birthday is honored equally with that of President Richard M. Nixon, who was impeached.

Andrew Johnson was impeached. Bill Clinton was impeached. Richard Nixon resigned before articles of impeachment could be brought before the House of Representatives for a vote.  If any newspaper's editors should know this, it would be those of The Washington Post.

The Post's correction of this error appears at the top of the page on its web site:

An earlier version of this story incorrectly said that President Nixon was impeached. He resigned before he could be impeached. This version has been corrected.

The "corrected" paragraph says that Nixon "resigned in disgrace."

So... Where were the copy editors?  How did sloppiness like this make it through the Metro section's editorial process?  Will the other errors also merit corrections in print or on the Post's web site?

Note:  The web headline for Najarro's article is: "Rep. Frank Wolf’s final acts include restoring Washington’s Birthday."

Newspaper Writers Know

Writers for major newspapers are as aware as anyone of the absence of sufficient numbers of (or sufficiently talented) copy editors.

Here's an item from Al Kamen's "In the Loop" column in The Washington Post, published on August 6:

This deplorable error in an Associated Press wire dispatch Monday is surely the result of the demise of copy editors in the news business. The wire carried news of conservative political commentator Robert D. Novak -- who, by the way, was always gracious and helpful to us, despite his cranky public persona -- and his retirement from the biz after he was diagnosed with a brain tumor.

And then a terrible gaffe: "Novak has been a columnist for the Chicago Sun-Times for decades. He announced late last month he has a brain."

Where Are the Copy Editors?

The newspaper business is going through cataclysmic changes. Readership is down, advertising revenues are down, newsstand sales are down. More people are getting their news from television and the Internet.

As a consequence, newsroom staffs are shrinking. The Washington Post, for instance, recently made a major buy-out offer to its employees, which led to many veteran reporters and editors choosing early retirement. The Post's longtime, low-key executive editor, Leonard Downie, has announced his own retirement, and the newspaper has a new publisher, Katharine Weymouth.

Similar -- and sometimes more drastic -- changes are taking place at other major newspapers, including the Chicago Tribune, Los Angeles Times, and New York Times.

As these seismic shifts are being felt, old-fashioned copy editing is falling through the cracks. I am finding more, and more frequent, errors in the daily newspaper than ever before -- errors that normally would be caught before publication by competent and sharp-eyed copy editors and proofreaders.

Don't get me wrong: There are few more admirable miracles than the production of a major daily newspaper. Even before -- or perhaps especially before -- the advent of the 24-hour news cycle, the idea that an event could occur at noon, be discovered at 1:00 p.m., a reporter dispatched at 1:30, and a story and analysis written, edited, typeset, and printed by midnight for the early editions the next day is practically unfathomable.

Instantaneous communication -- with any blogger (myself included) able to post audio, video, photographs, and text within minutes after an event and letting the whole world know about it -- has jaundiced our opinions on the press. Reporters and editors deserve a great deal more respect than they often get.

But ...

In my other blog, Rick Sincere News and Thoughts, an eclectic mix of political and cultural commentary that has been on the web since December 2004, I every once in a while pick up on a disjointed word choice or odd sentence that does not, to be kind, serve its author well.

Sometimes I have found factual errors that should never have seen print. (For example, see my blogpost on historian Andrew Trees, who seems unaware that the Twenty-Seventh Amendment to the U.S. Constitution was ratified 16 years ago.)

As these items come more frequently to my attention, I want to point them out and ask, "Where are the copy editors?"

Sometimes these items are unintentionally (I hope) funny; sometimes they are embarrassing; sometimes they are just sad. But they need to be identified and corrected.

I have started this narrowly-focused blog to bring these errors, mistakes, and howlers to the surface. I don't intend to be picayunish. I won't, as a rule, wag my finger at simple typos (typographical errors). But wrong word choice, badly constructed sentences, and errors of fact are fair game.

I'm also interested in opening up a dialogue on the question of copy editing. Is it an art or a craft? Is it a lost art, or a lost craft? Is it still necessary in the Internet Age? (I obviously think it is.)

I learned to edit at the feet (metaphorically speaking) of Ernest W. Lefever and Carol Griffith at the Ethics and Public Policy Center in the early 1980s. They not only taught me the skills involved in working with a manuscript, but also instilled in me high standards for what constitutes acceptable grammar, punctuation, and syntax. Those standards animate what will follow in this blog.

I don't intend to have any particular targets here. I suspect that the Washington Post, Washington Times, and Charlottesville Daily Progress will be the most frequently cited, simply because those are the newspapers I read in their print editions. Other publications may meet my gaze, but only if I run across an item on their web sites. I may also bring to my readers' attention the comments of others in the same vein.