THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, May 12, 1996 TAG: 9605110027
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J5 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: LYNN FEIGENBAUM
LENGTH: Medium: 88 lines
Did you ever have one of those weeks when you went out of town . . . and wished you had stayed away just a little longer?
Well, let me join the club. I was in Philadelphia this past week attending the annual gathering of the Organization of News Ombudsmen, a group of reader representatives from the United States, South America, Europe, Japan and Israel.
Each year, we hold workshops, hear speakers and share tales of woe - hence our acronym, ONO (as in ``Oh, no, not another error!''). And each year we are astounded to find out that, despite cultural and language differences, we share similar journalistic problems and solutions.
I returned to work Thursday in an upbeat frame of mind, and happy to hear from my assistant, Debbie Alexander, that there were no major problems with Tuesday's election coverage. In fact, a couple of readers had called in to say thank you!
I believe the thanks were justified. Coverage was, for the most part, thorough, issue-oriented and user-friendly - not an easy feat in an election that sometimes seemed to have more candidates than voters.
But my delight soon turned into the proverbial ``Oh, no!'' We learned that Thursday's front-page banner story was based on miscounted voter-turnout figures from Suffolk. The mistake was ours. Someone added up all the City Council and School Board votes, even though most of the votes were cast by the same people.
Those precinct figures ran in the newspaper on Wednesday and, strangely, no one had challenged them. The error was then compounded in Thursday's post-election story, which referred to those ``amazing numbers'' - among them, a 94.3 percent turnout in one Suffolk precinct.
That's a number that would, or should, make anyone stop in his tracks. But it was never double-checked with the city's voter registrars. And it was wrong, by a long shot; the correct turnout was less than 50 percent.
The sad result of such a mistake is not the lengthy correction, or even the corrected story, that ran in Friday's A section and on the MetroNews front. It's all the weeks and months of solid reporting that can be overturned by a few careless missteps.
AN IMMODEST PROPOSAL? Some folks take their college graduations seriously. Four readers complained about last Sunday's front-page coverage of the Old Dominion University rites.
The story, ``A bachelor's decree,'' and photos focused on a graduating student getting a marriage proposal during the ceremony.
The callers, parents and students, felt we were trivializing the occasion. After all, the proposal - held up in signs from the stands - disrupted a serious ceremony by ODU President James V. Koch and the keynote speaker, the Rev. Samuel D. Proctor.
James H. Simpson of Newport News, whose son graduated from ODU Saturday, dismissed the proposal as a publicity stunt. By putting it on the front page, he said, we gave the younger generation the go-ahead to act up.
``If they had waited until the processional was going out, it wouldn't have been so bad,'' said Simpson, ``but they did it during the president's speech. What message is this sending to the younger generation? What about the first Rhodes scholar from ODU? Where was her picture? The other 2,199 students got no publicity at all.''
Sherman L. Reed of Virginia Beach, one of the ODU graduates, also was angry that the newspaper ``totally ignored the thousands of people that were there getting their degrees and the four years of hard work, not to mention their families. This was a cutesy, sweetsy, lovey-dovey thing, but it was totally inappropriate behavior and it disrupted the ceremony.''
Philip Walzer, the reporter who wrote the story, sees it differently. He says, ``The marriage proposal made this graduation ceremony unusual; it will be the part of the ceremony best-remembered by most people who attended.''
The graduates he talked to afterward seemed to enjoy the proposal. They found it ``touching and heart-warming,'' said Walzer, ``attributes our newspaper is sometimes accused of ignoring. Dana Burnett, the vice president of (ODU) student services, told me this week that he, too, appreciated the story and that it reflected the spirit of graduation.''
I didn't really have a big problem with the story - it could have had a little less about the proposal and a little more about the graduation itself. But it did include highlights of Proctor's speech. Also, Walzer has written several articles about ODU's Rhodes scholar.
But there could have been at least one photo, even on an inside page, of the keynote speaker or of a graduate getting his or her diploma. Maybe not as exciting as a proposal, but it would have helped balanced things out.
It doesn't take a degree to know that getting one is taken seriously.
MEMO: Call the public editor at 446-2475, or send a computer message to
lynn(AT)infi.net by CNB