People seem more and more willing to let small mistakes go as if they don't matter. But they do matter and need to be corrected.
A retired professor friend was dithering about whether to write the local paper to correct an error in a story. He was sure if he did the complaint would be dismissed as petty.
The paper described a retired associate professor we know as a "Professor Emeritus." There are three professorial academic ranks: assistant, associate and full. Attaining full professor or simply "professor" rank requires significant publications, research, and teaching performance. Emeritus status requires further distinction to be granted by the university, and is granted only to those who retire as full professors.
Rewards in academic life, beyond personal satisfaction, are few and attaining full professor rank and retiring as emeritus are important achievements. Unfortunately, whoever wrote the story, like many people, thought "emeritus" just means retired. So by printing what they did, they gave one person an unmerited boost and lessened the achievements of a good number of others.
I'm using this example precisely because most people will think it unimportant. The point I want to make is that correction of media errors like the one the paper made are invariably shrugged off if only a few have anything at stake in getting things right. My friend's correction would have been laughed off because it just doesn't matter to most that a few old profs out there were slighted.
The trouble with this is that the more tolerant we grow of media mistakes and the less we care because they affect only a few, the lower we drop the threshold for sloppiness and indifference. When I told an acquaintance about writing this article, she said it was silly to do so because it wasn't like the paper got the victim-count wrong after a disaster. Is that the guideline for media accuracy, then, the right number of deaths?
Tolerance of mistakes is one thing; indifference to correctness is quite another. At first I grew tired, then I grew concerned at how many times I heard someone say "Oh, it doesn't matter" when I pointed out things like a misspelled word on a menu or misattribution of a quotation. No, the particular instances don't really matter, but the attitude they reveal when they pile up definitely does matter.
Ever have anyone say "It doesn't matter" when it came to money or their age? That's the trouble: too many don't care about correctness if it doesn't cost them personally.
My thanks to Mel.
