Reporting 101

Matthew Hoy
By Matthew Hoy on August 7, 2007

I don't remember which of my college reporting classes it was, but one professor had a policy which allowed you to throw out a grade for a single assignment at the end of term, if you had never misspelled anyone's name in any assignment for the entire quarter.

Needless to say, very few grades were tossed out -- and I wasn't an exception.

The guys over at Powerline point out that The New York Times needs a similar lesson from my old professor on the importance of getting names right.

An article in some copies on Wednesday about Congressional efforts to pass legislation to expand the government’s electronic wiretapping powers misspelled — yet again — the surname of the attorney general of the United States, in three of four references. He is Alberto R. Gonzales, not Gonzalez. (The Times has misspelled Mr. Gonzales’s name in at least 14 articles dating to 2001 when he became White House counsel. This year alone Mr. Gonzales’s name has been misspelled in February and March, and in two articles in April.)

An article on the Street Scene page in Business Day on Friday, about the law firm Cravath, Swaine & Moore’s entry into bankruptcy law practice, misspelled the name of another law firm that recently lost a bankruptcy specialist. It is Willkie Farr & Gallagher, not Wilkie. (The Times has misspelled the firm’s name in at least 50 articles since 1958. The “Willkie” comes from Wendell L. Willkie, who joined the firm shortly after losing the 1940 presidential election to Franklin D. Roosevelt and remained there until his death in October 1944.)

Of course, whoever's writing the corrections needs some help too. Who is the antecedent of "his" in "his death in October 1944" Willkie or Roosevelt?

0 comments on “Reporting 101”

  1. No disrespect, but please do not use Wikipedia as a source for anything any more. I was on there and tried to revise their blatantly biased article on Joe Wilson, whom they made out to be a saint with a halo. Each time I was correctly, booted off, and blocked. No matter how much source backing I gave to my arguments that Wilson was a liar, they just didn't want to hear about it. They finally sided with some liberal scumbag who said that Wilson was not a liar, but Bush and Cheney were. I left there. Do not use them as a source. They are leftists who bias their articles, and I have seen numerous anti-Semitic comments on there as well which were not erased.

    Tim Osman

  2. C'mon, Tim. I used wikipedia for the death dates of two long-dead politicians. It's not like I linked to it for an unbiased analysis of FDR's economic policies and it's not like I'll be using their analysis of the Joe Wilson saga.

    Though, again, I may use them for Wilson's death date.

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