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138 The Last Line of Defense When Christine Urban reported on newspaper credibility in 1989, she gave equal weight to factual errors and mistakes in spelling or grammar as sources of public mistrust.1 In Chapter 5, we found support for her assertion that factual errors are important. Now we turn to spelling and grammar. Copy editors were the last line of defense in protecting newspapers from error. They had more control over spelling and grammar than they did over factual error. Beyond verifying names and addresses, newspapers did not routinely fact-check their writers.2 A copy editor who lived in the community and knew it well might question a reporter’s less intuitive assertions, verify a fact in the newspaper’s archives, or even call a source to check the spelling of a name. But the main concern was with form. In a 2003 survey, Frank Fee and I discovered that copy editors representing no more than 15 percent of daily newspaper circulation in the United States agreed with the statement, “My newspaper rewards copy editors who catch errors in the paper.” While catching errors before they appear in the paper is of understandably higher priority, it shows that copy editors were considered more as pre-production processors than as quality monitors. 1. Urban, Examining Our Credibility: Perspectives of the Public and the Press (Reston, Va.: American Society of Newspaper Editors, 1989), 5. 2. One exception was USA TODAY, which employed a fact-checker to vet the work of free-lancers who contributed to the editorial pages. Chapter 8 The Last Line of Defense 139 Spelling and grammar are important in literate societies because consistency makes the task of reading easier. Seeing a misspelled word in print can stop you in your tracks and break your concentration. For this reason, media go beyond the guidance found in dictionaries and create their own stricter set of standards. A dictionary is intended to describe how the language is actually used, and so it is tolerant of variant spellings and changes in usage. A style book prescribes much more specific rules for spelling and grammar. The basic style book in the newspaper business of the twentieth century was the one produced by the Associated Press. Since most major newspapers were its clients, it served as the default standard, and all the others were variations on it. In 1989, Morgan David Arant and I realized that an electronic database could be employed for a task its designers never intended: finding errors in spelling and grammar and comparing their rates in different newspapers. Electronic archives were still a novelty, but we were able to search fifty-eight newspapers archived in the DataTimes and VU/TEXT systems that were dominant at the time. Our technique was simple. We searched for the following errors. miniscule (instead of minuscule) judgement (instead of judgment) accomodate (instead of accommodate) most unique (instead of unique) The misspellings miniscule and judgement have become so common that dictionaries are starting to recognize them. Style books do not. The absence of the second “m” in accommodate is not allowed by dictionaries. And unique, by definition, is not modifiable by a superlative. A thing is either the only one of its kind or it is not. To allow for differences in newspaper size and varying word frequencies, we expressed each misspelling or misuse as a proportion of the total—correct and incorrect—uses. We found that “minuscule” was misspelled 20 percent of the time across all forty-eight newspapers. The unwanted e in judgment and the missing m in accommodate accounted for 2 percent of all usages of each word. And the inappropriate most was attached to 1 percent of all uses of unique. Because databases were new, our sample then was limited to a six-month period in the first half of 1989. The four items were nicely intercorrelated, a sign that they measured some underlying factor that we chose to identify as editing accuracy. To adjust for the differing frequency of the test words, we standardized the scores before ranking the newspapers. In other words, the error rates were 140 The Vanishing Newspaper expressed in terms of their standard deviations from the average across all fifty-eight newspapers. The Ghost in the Newsroom The best-edited of the fifty-eight papers was the Akron Beacon Journal, scoring nearly a full standard deviation above the mean. I called Dale Allen, the editor, to congratulate him and ask how that feat was managed...

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