The importance of being accurate

We had another error in today's paper.

This column about Sharia Law incorrectly reported that most of the U.S. Court of Appeals' 10th circuit had  judges were selected by George W. Bush, which means the court will have a more conservative lean. That isn't true. The truth is that George W. Bush had a decent run of selecting judges, but out of the 19 judges, only six were selected by George W. Bush. The court may still have a conservative lean because a chunk was selected by Ronald Reagan and one was selected by George H. W. Bush (W's daddy).

We have to be careful with the way we phrase things, even on the opinion page. Jess Eddy, the columns author, called me and admitted he made a mistake, and he talked about how he intended to say that Bush had a decent run in selecting judges during his presidency. That's true, and I value Eddy's accountability and honesty. He didn't blame anyone else. That's a quality every reporter, editor and any other employee at The Oklahoma Daily should have.

VERIFY, VERIFY, VERIFY


Take a look at this statement:

We have the worst roads in the nation; we are ranked 43rd in the nation in K-12 education spending; we have the third-highest incarceration rate, and we are facing a $500 million budget shortfall for 2012. Those are some pretty serious issues.

Now, looking at the "worst roads in the nation" phrase, this can be interpreted a few different ways. At first, it can be taken pretty literally, and if that was the author's plan, it's not accurate according to this U.S. Public Interest Research report. There is also this blog (which I'm a bit more skeptical about) showing other states with a larger percentage of their roads in disrepair. Looking at it this way, I would say this isn't really true.

The other way to say this is it could be the author's opinion (based on hopefully his knowledge base of others thoughts on our roads and his experiences traveling the states) that Oklahoma's roads are the worst. We are all entitled to our opinions, especially on the opinion page. However, I would caution all of you to take a moment and think about your statement when considering to say something is the WORST. Making those types of statements aren't valuable if they can be proven mostly incorrect by research groups using, hopefully, objective methods to gather that data.


FINAL THOUGHTS

While I've picked on this column a bit, my reasoning doesn't stop at that section. Every section of the newspaper must champion the values of truth and verification. Our news, sports, opinions, multimedia, photography and life and arts content will be better if our practices contain our core, journalistic values (Yeah, totally taking that from my recent capstone class).

If we do that, everyone — including our readers — will be better citizens.