Sunday, August 15, 2010

Today in Journalistic Errors

Milenio's Sunday magazine has an article about the recent opinion versus straight-up journalism debate as it relates to the Washington Post and the future of the industry. Evidently, rigorous fact-checking doesn't figure into Milenio's concept of the future, because they referred to the subject of the article as Mark Weigel, when his name is, in fact, Dave. The article also includes a caption of the Argentine journalist Andrés Repetto that spells his last name as Rettepo.

2 comments:

jd said...

Checking the spelling of names, especially foreign ones, is considered totally optional in most papers in the region, regardless of prestige level. I think I've read about reports by "Human Rigth Watch" in newspapers from 8 different countries. And really foreign names, eg Eastern European...oh boy. When Bolivia had the alleged assassination of Evo conspiracy last year in which Hungarians and Croats were participants, the papers spelled the conspirators' names differently every day for like three weeks.

Although the butchery of Spanish words in the US press - no accents, wrong genders - is pretty consistent too, especially in stories not by LatAm beat writers, which means the editors are pretty much relying on the writers to get that stuff right.

pc said...

Yeah the "ght" combo always causes problems. It's been a while since I've read about "Barrack" Obama though, which is surely points in their favor.