Regret the error

Newspapers print some version of a correction nearly every day, usually a brief admission that a story went wrong somewhere between the reporter's notebook and the press. Craig Silverman, who runs RegretTheError.com, a widely read site about media mistakes, has gathered a range of these blunders, some absurd, some alarming, and a few ethically indefensible. Readers meet sloppy arithmetic, the mistake of running an obituary for someone still alive, and many other failures across the press.

Many of the examples are openly comic, but the book also looks back at the history of media errors, including the invented stories that filled newspapers during the 19th-century circulation wars. It then turns to a more pointed inquiry into how little journalism answers to the public when it gets things wrong.

The result is a study of how carelessness and weak or missing fact checking can produce embarrassing and sometimes tragic results.