Multiple corrections on US story earn Reuters a black mark

The story last Thursday looked at what it called the “unlikely” vice-presidential prospects of Florida Republican Senator Marco Rubio. The headline said “Florida’s Rubio a star, but an unlikely VP pick” for the Republican nominee’s running mate in this year’s presidential election.

“Former Reuters staffer and current Washington Examiner senior editorial writer Philip Klein called it a ‘hit piece’ and Daily Caller was early to spot problems with the reporting,” said The Poynter Institute, a journalism school at the University of South Florida, St Petersburg. “Politico’s Dylan Byers has also been on the story, and notes that Reuters is not talking publicly about what happened.

“One senior staffer at Reuters described the episode to me as a ‘fiasco,’ another as a ‘disgrace’,” a Poynter writer wrote on the institute’s website. “It was so bad, in fact, that the editors and writer involved have been asked not to talk about it. (I reached out to editors David Lindsey and Eric Walsh, but have not heard back.)”

Poynter said a correction had been added to the story, “but one thing to note is Reuters’ correction style isn’t well-suited to public consumption, as it’s more to geared towards the company’s newswire clients. As a result, the Rubio correction reads more like a list, offering no context or acknowledgement that the story suffered from serious problems. But at least you can see the errors that had to be fixed.” The correction:

(Removes words “and at times has had difficulty paying his mortgage,” paragraph 7; removes “he did not make payments on a $100,000-plus student loan” and instead states “he did not pay down the balance of a $100,000-plus student loan,” paragraph 10; removes “he was caught up in an Internal Revenue Service Investigation” and instead states “his name surfaced in an Internal Revenue Service investigation,” paragraph 12; removes “voted against Sonia Sotomayor, Obama’s Supreme Court nominee” and instead states “opposed President Barack Obama’s Supreme Court nomination of Sonia Sotomayor,” paragraph 41; removes “voted against Obama’s healthcare overhaul” and instead states “opposed Obama’s healthcare overhaul,” paragraph 41) ■