First, biggest, only

Just a reminder that your double-naught copy-editing license allows you to stop and frisk any claim that some person or event is the first, or tallest, or loudest, or longest. As in:

An obituary on Wednesday about Beate Sirota Gordon, who helped write the Constitution of post-World War II Japan, erroneously attributed a distinction to her. She was one of the last living members of the team that wrote Japan’s Constitution — not the last. (At least one other member, Milton J. Esman, is still alive.)

An obituary on Wednesday about the actor Harry Carey Jr. erroneously attributed a distinction to him. He was one of the last surviving members of “a group known informally in Hollywood as the John Ford stock company” — actors whom the director John Ford cast frequently in his films; he was not the last. (At least two other actors who often worked for Ford, Maureen O’Hara and Patrick Wayne, are still alive.)

As a general rule, there is a first and there is a biggest; sometimes there's an only. One time-tested way of keeping errors out of the paper is asking writers to provide a score sheet and a list of runners-up whenever they make such a claim.

Dyed man walking

Want to know what the NYT's Sunday offlede looked like in the earlies? The gunmen had "long died-red beards."

It'll be interesting to see whether the Times corrects an error in the jump hed (9A in the national edn* on sale in the nether bowels of the Denver airport):

10 Aid Workers From The West Are Slain in Afghanistan

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On clues and having them

I think the cousins at McClatchy (along with Charlotte and any other MCT fishwraps or subscribers that ran this lede) owe the reading public a correction or two:

With the jobless rate rising and his approval ratings sinking, President Barack Obama hosted academics and leaders of business and labor at a White House jobs summit Thursday, seeking advice on how to boost employment.

If you're the sort of paper that promises to correct errors of fact, it's time to get to work. First up is that rising unemployment rate -- in a story written, as noted in the eighth graf, "a day before the Labor Department releases November unemployment statistics." In a way, it's bad luck for the writers that the November stats show "an unexpected dip" in unemployment, but it's bad luck enabled by bad judgment. We have a really simple rule of basic journalism for that: Write about what happened, not about what you think might happen. That way, you don't have to write corrections when your guess turns out to be wrong.*

You can see why the lede looked attractive, though; that concise pairing of contrasting elements just captures the old zeitgeist perfectly, doesn't it? Trouble is, the second element is no truer than the first -- it's not as demonstrably false, but it can only be true with a reading of the available evidence that's so selective as to be deliberately distorted.

Obama's decline in the ratings is the sort of conventional wisdom that drives much of the discourse at Fox, where it's popular because it makes sense and helps other things make sense. In the reality-based world, we're supposed to rely on evidence -- that being, after all, where journalism gets its claim to be objective. So let's look at the roundup of polls over at RealClearPolitics (not the "RCP Average," which is a meaningless number no responsible journalist would ever allow into print).

Obama's job approval in the Gallup poll, with an N of around 1,500 adults, is a point higher than it was last month (52% vs. 51%). Rasmussen (N = 1,500 likelies) is unchanged at 46%. USAT/Gallup, with around 1,000 adults, is unchanged from October at 50% (bigger N, for some unknown reason). Quinnipiac's big-N survey (2,000-plus registered voters) is at 48% for early-ish November, down from 50% at the end of September. The brand-new CNN poll (48%, 1,041 adults) looks like a significant decline from two weeks ago, 55%, but we want to look at that a little closer. It could mean any of several things:

1) The change in the sample value represents a real change in the population value
2) The three previous CNN polls (55%, 54%, 55%) closely approximated the population value and this one is a far outlier -- the one case in 20 (at 95% confidence) in which the sample lies outside the confidence interval, or "margin of sampling error"
3) The real population value is around 51%, so all four samples are accurate (if extreme) nonchance representations of the population

What's the safe way to put it? Were I in a mood to generalize, I'd say that the president's job approval declined significantly from summer into fall but appears to have kinda-sorta leveled out. At Gallup, it's a point higher than in mid-September; at Rasmussen, it's a point lower. (Yes, survey data is a lot less sexy when you do it right.) And that makes our lede wrong on the second count as well. You can believe whatever you want to about public opinion,** but if you want to proclaim facts and attribute them to evidence, sorry -- you don't get to make things up.

Does that make McClatchy biased? Yes, but not in the partisan way that tends to be associated with the "media bias" that people like to yammer about. It's biased toward explaining things in terms of conventional wisdom, without regard toward whether the conventional wisdom is either true or informative. That's probably less offensive than the open and deliberate biases on offer at the Fair 'n' Balanced Network (and it certainly isn't as pervasive), but in terms of adding to or subtracting from the sum of human knowledge, it's hard to see how it's any better.

* A lede that said unemployment was expected to have been found to have risen again in the upcoming monthly report would have been accurate.
** If any of the MCT folks want to argue about confidence levels, the address is at right.

Whence the error?

Keep your eye on the Times's corrections column over the next couple days. A couple of things in today's edn look as if they could be blamed on the desk. Not blown saves, like the palette/palate blunder in the excruciating beer feature on the N&O front or the flaunt/flout error in the Freep, but out-and-out, scalpel-in-the-patient, desk-induced errors. Hope not, but we'll see.

Why do the two in the Times look like desk errors, while the others don't? Because they don't fit a pattern. The Freep slip -- "It's wrong," he said. And he may flaunt the new rules -- is common in speech and writing, and like many papers, the Freep's undergunned and underedited these days. The N&O piece too gets a familiar pair backward, and it also gives off signs of being overwritten:

As he kicked back a glass of Dirty Bastard Scotch Ale, he added with a smile, "I will not be pacing myself."

Not quite. "Kick back," transitive, is something usually done with money. "Kick back," intransitive, was immortalized by Willie Nelson in "The Electric Horseman," with a general sense of relaxation (oh, look it up). Our writer is probably looking for "knocked back," which the OED traces back more than seven decades with the meaning of "to drink (esp. intoxicants) or eat heartily or heavily; to swallow a drink at a gulp." Judging from the article as a whole, though, the writer seems likely to be the sort whose response to usage questions is "Thanks, let's keep it the way it is."

Sorry! [/tripdownmemorylane] Anyway, the thing about the two examples in the Times is that unlike these, they don't sound like the sorts of things writers -- good ones, bad ones, overworked ones, overpraised ones -- produce on their own. As in:

The White House of the 1860s bore little resemblance to the modern institution; Lincoln had two important staffers and a cabinet filled with contentious personalities, several of whom considered themselves superior to the president.

Something's missing. The point of the clause can't how many important staffers Lincoln had, because all chief executives have important staffers. Given the immediately preceding "some of the best American presidents encouraged robust debate," the point has to be not their numbers but -- given their near-equal importance -- their level of disagreement. You have to wonder if that was in a clause that got snicked off as so many "needless words."

Same piece, third leg, first graf:

“It deteriorated in Reagan’s second term,” said John J. Pitney Jr., who served as a policy adviser and is now a professor at Claremont McKenna College. “You ran and leaked to conservative columnist Bob Novak before others ran to him and leaked on you.”

I know the AP writes like that, but do people really talk like that? "Hey, Martha, Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton is in town tonight!" "Wow, I wonder what she'll say about Pakistani President Gen. Pervez Musharraf's tarnished electoral victory?"

I'd hypothesize a confusion in style norms. Week-in-Review piece is submitted with (parenthetical) clarification reminding us who (columnist Bob) Novak is. Editor, aghast at violation of desk norms, takes out parens. In the confusion, cunning appositive escapes!

Make sense? Other hypotheses (or clarifications from agents connected to the Times) are welcome. But these just don't sound as if they came off a writer's bat that way.