We live in an era of low trust. According to polling from Gallup, fewer than one in three Americans have a “great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in the banks, public schools, big business, the criminal justice system, or large technology companies. While “the media’s” credibility is not quite as far down the toilet as that of Congress, we can hear lawmakers bickering in the pipes up around the bend.
Having been at The Dispatch for nearly six years now, I’d like to think that we have a stronger bond with our readers and listeners than is typical of the news-producer/news-consumer relationship. Steve Hayes and Jonah Goldberg made clear where we were coming from on Day 1, and we’ve done our level best to adhere to those founding principles every day since.
That said, we’ve made plenty of mistakes along the way. We employ some of the brightest, most diligent, and hardest-working reporters and editors in the business, but we are all juggling a number of different responsibilities, covering rapidly developing stories, working on tight deadlines, and, most importantly, human. We take great pride in the editing and internal fact-checking processes we’ve built, but we’re going to get things wrong.
From the very beginning, The Dispatch’s policy has always been to clearly label any substantive changes made to articles or newsletters after publication, and call out any corrections in bold at the bottom of the page. Going forward, we are taking that policy a step further by introducing a monthly roundup that compiles all the corrections we issued that month in one place. This list will always be longer than we’d like it to be, but we can promise you that we are always striving to get the story right.
As you read the bullets below, please note that our processes at The Dispatch are collaborative and multi-layered; mistakes that slip through the cracks are almost never the fault of any one single person. Sometimes, a reporter’s draft will include erroneous information that multiple editors fail to catch; other times, an editor will inadvertently introduce an error while trying to improve a story. Ultimately, I run the editorial process, and the responsibility for mistakes that make it to publication lies with me.
So, without further ado, here are April’s corrections and clarifications. And if you come across something that you believe requires a correction, please email us at corrections@thedispatch.com.
