I MADE a mistake. At the very least, I repeated a mistake. Depending on the reporting in an article about Ronald Johnson’s open honor trial, I wrote that Sophie Staples, vice chair for trials, said the investigative panel and the jury may have had different definitions of what constitutes an honor offense.
Promptly after that appeared, Staples e-mailed me and The Cavalier Daily’s editors to say she’d been misquoted.
“This specific comment of mine has been misquoted by The Cavalier Daily on two separate occasions,” she wrote. “It was first misquoted by Cameron Feller in the article following that Sunday’s Committee meeting, and was misquoted today by your Ombudsman, Tim Thorton. Both of these articles quote me as saying that there is a different between the I-Panels and student jurors’ definitions of an honor offense.’ This is certainly inaccurate. It is not the definition of an honor offense that is different, but the standard of proof by which such offense must be proved.”
In my experience, when people claim to have been misquoted, what’s usually happened is they misspoke. Or they said something and now they’re catching heat for it and they want to deflect the flame.
A colleague of mine who covers town council meetings thinks the best thing that’s happened on her beat is the Webcast of meetings. A person can go on the town’s Web site and review previous meetings. Now, when a council member calls to complain about being misquoted, the reporter suggests that they watch the tape to see what they really said, then call back if they still have a problem.
No one’s called back yet.
But this time, Staples offered up the minutes of the meeting as proof. And the minutes clearly say that Staples said there are different standards of proof.
Staples goes on in her e-mail: “I understand that it is not always possible to record someone’s exact wording, but I am disappointed that The Cavalier Daily would distort my comment in such a way as to significantly change its meaning.”
She’s right. It is not always possible to record someone’s exact wording. That’s when a reporter should paraphrase rather than quote.
And, as Staples suggested in her e-mail, a reporter who isn’t positive what someone said should ask for an explanation. But mistakes will happen. Not long ago, a transcription of a Rupert Murdoch quote got a lot of attention. Murdoch was quoted as saying his company had never tolerated facts. What he actually said was his company had never tolerated fat – as in bloated budgets, not bloated bellies. That’s quite a difference. Once the quote started making the rounds, Murdoch’s people jumped on it and cleared things up pretty quickly. And there’s a lesson in that.
If you’re ever misquoted by this newspaper or any other media outlet, I suggest that you contact the people who did the misquoting right away. Once something gets in print – and in a media outlet’s archives – it takes on a life of its own. A week after the first misquote of Staples’ statement, it appeared in the paper again because I put it there. If Staples hadn’t e-mailed, it may well have appeared again, since honor seems to be a perpetual topic of discussion.
Everyone who works at a newspaper wants their reporting to be as accurate as possible. If you can help us correct mistakes and improve our accuracy, please do.
Having said all that, I think the underlying point of last week’s column is still valid. Though Staples emphasized the difference in the standards of proof under which the investigative panel and juries operate, I still have to wonder if there isn’t a difference in definition, too.
The issue was whether the case, which involved a student who said he guessed at several answers on a multiple choice test, should have been brought to trial at all. The professor who brought the charge seemed to equate guessing with cheating. Unless there was some evidence that didn’t come up at trial, or didn’t make it into the report on the trial, the investigative panel must have agreed with that premise. The jury, clearly, didn’t.
So there’s still a need for that series of articles examining and explaining the workings of the Honor system.
Tim Thornton is The Cavalier Daily Ombudsman. He can be reached at ombud@cavalierdaily.com.
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