Ed Kemmick
I have publicly shamed myself over the years by apologizing for errors that have crept into my news stories and columns.
Twenty-five years ago, I wrote a very long profile of a doctor in St. Paul who still made house calls. The person who suggested I write about the good doctor gave me his first name wrong and I never checked that cardinal fact, since I kept referring to him in conversation as “Doctor.”
More recently, I spelled the last name wrong in writing about the exploits of a World War II hero. Ed Reilly, who died last week, had called the Gazette himself to suggest he had a good story to tell, and the receptionist who jotted down his number spelled his name “Riley.”
I am not blaming the receptionist. I am blaming the idiot reporter who did not ask the subject of the story how to spell his name.
And as I say, I publicly apologized for those errors, because there really is no excuse for spelling someone’s name wrong. To forgive that kind of flub is like saying a surgeon was great at virtually every aspect of his job, except for tying off sutures.
A measure of how seriously newspapers take this regrettable error was furnished last week when the New York Times printed the following correction:
“An article on Jan. 20, 1853, recounting the story of Solomon Northup, whose memoir ‘12 Years a Slave’ became a movie 160 years later that won the best picture Oscar at the 86th Academy Awards on Sunday night, misspelled his surname as Northrop. And the headline misspelled it as Northrup. The errors came to light on Monday after a Twitter user pointed out the article in The Times archives.”
Personally, I think the Times should apologize for that 26-word clause between the third and fourth commas, but never mind. The point is, the most famous newspaper in the world has corrected a mistake, or mistakes, it made 161 years earlier. Given the unhealthy habits of most newspaper reporters, that is something like eight generations of reporters later.
What I have not seen anyone else point out is that on the same day, March 4, the Times ran another correction regarding the award-winning movie. That correction said that elsewhere in the paper, the relatives of Solomon Northup were misidentified as his ancestors, when in fact they were his descendants.
I don’t want to pile on or be a smarty-pants — OK, I do — but I would like to bring two more errors to the Times’ attention. That same 1853 article in which the sharp-eyed Tweeter spotted the dual misspellings of Northup made several references to the owner of the slave pen in Washington, D.C. (then Washington City) where Northup was first taken after his kidnapping
What was his name? Good question. The article spells it “Burch” several times and “Birch” at least once. Can we expect another correction?
Then there is the mistake in the March 4 correction itself, which refers to Solomon Northup’s memoir as “12 Years a Slave.” That was the title of the movie. The memoir was titled “Twelve Years a Slave.”
I know this because I went to a bookseller’s site and found a photograph of the title page of the first edition of Northup’s famous memoir. (Priced at $12,500, if you’re interested.)
So, what am I doing, offering my services to the Times as a proofreader and fact-checker? No. I don’t have the time. It’s all I can do to write enough stories and post them on Last Best News — and hope and pray that they contain no embarrassing blunders.
And that’s why I can point out mistakes made by the New York Times without gloating or bragging or pointing fingers. It is always so much easier to find mistakes made by other people.
My own most frequent blunder is the dropping of articles and prepositions, those little components of a sentence one tends to supply mentally when they are missing — at least when one is proofing one’s own work. When someone else makes the mistake, it is usually all too apparent.
So for today, before this column goes out to the world, I will take some measure of satisfaction in knowing that even the illustrious and fabulously compensated people at the New York Times make stupid mistakes, sometimes many of them in one day.
In that respect, at least, I am their equal.
