When Mistakes Happen…
By Gary Hanson, Kent State University

Everyone makes mistakes, even in television newsrooms, and sometimes mistakes get on the air. But how often? And with what consequences? Those were some of the questions in a recent national survey of 75 news managers that Stanley Wearden and I conducted at Kent State University with support from NewsLab. The results are sobering, and raise questions about efforts to achieve accuracy in TV news.

The survey revealed that errors are common in both large and small markets, occurring at least once or twice a week. In just over a quarter of the newsrooms surveyed, managers said errors get on the air every day. The most common mistakes are misspellings and mispronunciations; most news managers said they don’t consider those errors particularly serious. The most significant error, they said, was getting a fundamental fact wrong, which was the least common mistake they reported. Far more frequent were subjective errors—inflating a story’s importance, for example, or producing a misleading promo. Yet even though errors in promos have led to high-profile lawsuits that have cost stations millions of dollars, most news managers ranked those kinds of errors as less serious than factual errors like getting a name or number wrong.

Whatever the perceived gravity of the error, journalists who make mistakes rarely face serious consequences. Only one news manager out of the 75 surveyed said an employee would be fired for incorrectly reporting a person’s death. On the flip side, one respondent actually said that nothing at all would happen to an employee who incorrectly accused someone of a crime. But most news managers said anyone making either of those mistakes would deserve least a written reprimand, and about one in six said a mistake like that could lead to suspension.

Almost two-thirds of the news managers surveyed said that reporters are the first line of defense against mistakes, followed by newscast producers and executive producers. Script review is the major mechanism newsrooms have in place for catching mistakes, and as an earlier NewsLab study revealed, the script approval process in many newsrooms is haphazard at best. Even if script reviews are a regular occurrence, the person doing the review may not be in a position to catch mistakes other than spelling or grammatical errors because he or she doesn’t know the story well enough to spot errors of omission or distortion.

The survey results should serve as a warning to television newsrooms. If managers really believe that accuracy matters, they’d do well to consider what kind of message they send the staff when most mistakes merit only an oral reminder or reprimand. And if most managers count on reporters to catch their own mistakes, it might be wise to offer the less experienced among them some refresher training to make sure they’re equipped to do the job.