Over at MediaBugs, we’ve just published the second of our surveys of correction practices — this one nationwide. The results confirm the pattern we found in our first, Bay-Area-only study: Most news websites make it hard for readers to report errors and find corrections. Here are the gory details.
Interestingly, the cable news networks have the best overall record — a better one than newspapers or magazines. There’s one exception, however: the Fox News website is entirely lacking in any corrections-related content or information: no way to find out if they fixed something and no way to tell them they got it wrong. Apparently, over at Fox, they get everything right all the time, so why worry about this stuff?
As a result of what MediaBugs found in our first survey, we made a point of incorporating information about the error-correction practices of each media organization right in the MediaBugs interface — you can find it as part of each listing on our Browse by Media Outlet page.
If you’re involved in running one of these websites, have a look at MediaBugs’ best practices page — and know that repairing these problems really isn’t that much work.
If you’re a reader or user of these sites, consider taking the step of telling them about that page: assuming they haven’t buried their email address!