The Great Typo Hunt_ Two Friends Changing the World, One Correction at a Time - Jeff Deck [57]
What does “TEAL” stand for? Not only did we apparently call ourselves the “Typo Eradication Assistance League,” but we were also known as the Typo Elimination Advancement League, according to the article in The Dartmouth. I admit that I chose a long name for our team for humorous effect, but come on.
What are our names? In the print edition of the Boston Globe story about us, a photo caption identified me as Benjamin and Benjamin as me. The identity of my bewhiskered companion came constantly into question. The Baltimore Sun ran a photo caption identifying Benjamin as the twenty-third president of the United States—Benjamin Harrison. He appeared in the World Almanac, of all places, wearing my middle name as his first, as Michael Herson. The magazine Utne Reader inexplicably referred to him as Jeremy, perhaps to help him fit in with the rest of the League, Jeff, Josh, and Jane.
Where did the trip start? The Guardian had us beginning our trip in San Francisco and heading due east, perhaps confused by the BBC interview I did in San Francisco. Portland’s Oregonian got the starting city right, but then blew its spelling: “Summerville,” Massachusetts? Sounds magical!
What did I say? Britain’s The Sun apparently took as gospel an article on TEAL in the satirical magazine Private Eye, quoting me as lobbing rather harsh words: “Some people just have no feeling for language.” The BBC Magazine Monitor, in turn, dutifully quoted The Sun as quoting me saying that. Call me Jeremy if you want, but don’t put words in my mouth, mates.
We were only some dudes driving around with markers. It’s not like they screwed up reportage on an Iraq offensive, so who cares about whether they got our little story right? But every word in a news story presumably rests on research; every dollop of delicious factual nougat has supposedly been vetted by somebody. The widespread occurrence of errors about our trip gets a body wondering … what other stories have been misreported? One of the most egregious recent examples involved all the major media outlets parroting a story about a California paraplegic being healed by the bite of a brown recluse spider. Turns out nobody stopped to catch their breath and check the facts. The paraplegic was probably never paraplegic in the first place, which doctors only discovered once the spider bite got the guy to the hospital. Plus, there are no brown recluses in California, at least not outside of the arachnid zoo. Even if it had been one, the brown recluse’s venom is cytotoxic—it breaks down cells instead of repairing them.
Sounds ridiculous, until you consider that if a paper or website or cable channel doesn’t jump on a breaking story right away, they’ll look slow, out of touch. We, the consumers of all massively distributed information, made them that way. We demand information faster with each passing year and each emergent technology, heedless of that information’s accuracy, seeking only to keep the data IV pumping into our ravenous vessels. What is actually said matters less than its immediacy. It doesn’t have to be this way, though.
O fellow slaves to the datastream, I exhort you! Rise up and shuck your shackles!
Ahem. All right, I’m not an expert, I just played one on TV. Already far too much media criticism bobs around the Oceanus of the Internet, unsolicited and often hooting and jeering. The media are overextended and fighting to stay afloat, with shrinking revenues, massive staff layoffs, and unsustainable business models. So I won’t join the harpoon-slinging pack. I’m a guy who likes to read every piece of text he passes by; I tend to amble and ruminate. My ideal mediaverse would feature fewer, longer pieces in print and online; trading the cable-news trend of obsessively gnawing a few lean story bones for more measured, thoughtful coverage; and journos who have time to get the story right because readers and viewers chill while the fact-checkers earn their paychecks.*