Absurdity, Allegory and China

It took eight (8) months, but I was finally able to get the Guardian to correct two stories from mid-August, 2008. I wrote about this incident both here and here. So, today they finally published a partial correction:

A news story published during the Olympics in China reported that two protesters had abseiled down the China Central Television building in Beijing and had unfurled a banner, which said “Free Tibet” in Chinese and English. A sports column the next day said that five protesters had abseiled down the building. Both were wrong. Two campaigners, Philip Kirk and Nicole Rycroft, climbed up the back of one of the large Olympics billboards sited outside China’s state television news headquarters and rappelled down the billboard’s front after unrolling the banner (Olympic games: Climbers held over Tibet banner protest in Beijing, 15 August 2008, and CCTV quickly wears out its welcome with singing the country’s praises, 16 August 2008).

The other part of the sports column that wasn’t mentioned in the ‘correction’ was that the author, Marina Hyde, had the CCTV Headquarters up and running, reporters standing around the water cooler as news ‘went down’ all around them. Someone had forgotten to tell her that the building was and still is under construction, that no one abseiled from its head, and that the migrant workers inside the structure early on that morning wouldn’t have cared a royal hoot if anyone had abseiled passed them. Such is news.

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Update: While the correction is actually posted, nothing has been done to the original stories, which remain just as misreported as they were before. There is not even a mention on the page that refers back to the correction. So, anyone stumbling upon the original and very wrong article will have no idea that a correction was issued 8 months later, which reminds me once again of the New Yorker cartoon: “On the internet no one knows you’re a dog.” So much for ‘correction’ bones.

Last month I blogged about a misreport by AFP. Within two hours of posting my entry I’d received an email from a man at AFP who explained that the mistake was being chased down and corrected. The following afternoon he called me to let me know that they were not happy about the mistake and were doing everything they could to track the story, have corrections issued while replacing the original story with one that was accurate. I was impressed. The Guardian, on the other hand, is quite behind the eight-ball on this one. Their lame correction w/o appending or removing the original links is much like saying, “I’m sorry I cut you,” while unmovingly watching you bleed. I hope that it’s because they are slow on the uptake, though I would think that the ‘fix’ would precede the correction. The way it stands at the moment is more a journalistic Bushism than a correction. Big company that Guardian.