CCJ Tools

Nothing has the capacity to frame political debate more successfully than a good turn of phrase, characterization, or metaphor; nor can anything do more to pervert democratic discourse than inaccurate, imprecise, or misleading language. George Orwell understood the game and called its bluff more than sixty years ago. In words that offered an eerie forecast of the rhetoric of Vietnam, he noted that “defenceless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine- gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification.”

NEW YORK Barack Obama appears to have been the top target for press errors among candidates in the presidential campaign, according to regrettheerror.com, which posted its top media errors and corrections today.

Suggestions for handling errors and corrections in a way that your readers and viewers will appreciate:

NEW YORK The New York Times posted on its Web site today a lengthy profile of suddenly serious Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee that will not appear in print until this Sunday.

The Associated Press circulated last night a hot quote from the profile that gained wide attention, and then the Times put up the piece, titled "The Huckabee Factor." The quote AP used from Huckabee was: "Don't Mormons believe that Jesus and the devil are brothers?"

How many times have you been advised to "people-ize" your stories? Nothing wrong with the idea, but in practice, it often means just grabbing some M.O.S (man on the street) interviews at the scene. Consider an alternative approach: Ask people to discuss the subject among themselves, and shoot their conversation.

While copy editors often lament that managers and others don't listen to their complaints, a San Jose (Calif.) Mercury News manager suggested [recently] that those barriers to communication are sometimes created by the copy editors themselves.

David Halberstam was a 1964 Pulitzer Prize winner for his coverage of the war in Vietnam for the New York Times and best-selling author of The Best and the Brightest, The Powers That Be, The Children and many other works of non-fiction. Halberstam died in a car accident in April 2007. The following excerpt is from notes taken by CCJ Founding Chairman Bill Kovach on November 9, 1996.

In September 2007, Citizen Lab, a project of the Munk Centre for International Studies at the University of Toronto, published an electronic guide to help journalists and all international citizens get past Internet restrictions in their countries.

The San Jose Mercury News is trying to get readers involved in an overhaul of the newspaper and its website. The interactive project "Rethinking the Merc" is an attempt to find out from readers what they want in their local news organization.

This is a great example of an organization making more than just a token recognition of the role the public plays - and should play - in deciding the direction of its local news provider.