Irritated by the way British newspapers try to pretend that they never make mistakes, and if they are forced into a retraction, label it something like Mrs Eileen Dover, Computergram has always made it a policy to label corrections as such, and we’re delighted to see that both the Financial Times and the Daily Telegraph have now adopted the practice – but US papers have always done it and New York Times columnist Russell Baker puts the whole thing into perspective: Newspapers love to correct trivial errors, he writes – it makes them feel upright and takes up all the correction space, leaving them no room to confess their real howlers.
