Saturday, May 12, 2007

A Correction About Corrections

Here I am practicing what I preach. Earlier today, complaining about newspapers that don't make decent corrections, I said, "Go ahead. Find me the online 'corrections' section for The Washington Times. Reader Loren Collins did. It's on this page.

Nice to know they have one. I'm pretty sure they didn't a year or two ago...and they're sure keeping it a secret now. I couldn't find anything on their front page that leads to it, nor does it show up on their site map. So I think my point is still valid. Corrections are either not done at all or not done in a way that would cause most people who read the original piece to see the correction.

One last thing. I was amused by this one on the Washington Times corrections page...

Due to an editing error, The Washington Times yesterday incorrectly recounted the biblical story of Abraham disowning one of his sons. The son whom Abraham disowned was Ishmael.

I don't know why that struck me funny but it did.

• Posted at 2:19 PM · LINK

One More Thought About Fact-Checking...

I know I keep harping on this matter of people misspelling the names of Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster. I apologize for that. It's just that it strikes me as the simplest kind of error. I mean, there are a number of areas of dispute in comic book history. You'd think we could all, at least, get the inarguable stuff right.

But what just dawned on me about eight seconds ago was that the Internet has become a kind of sloppy fact-checker. In faulting that Newsday reporter, I said that if he'd just taken the few moments to Google "Blondie," he could have found out who was currently doing the strip, instead of the names he gave. That's true...if (boldface "if") he'd had the presence of mind to know what he was reading. The official Blondie website or the King Features Syndicate site are as close to authoritative as you could get. But there's also faulty info on the Internet. Lots of it.

Case in point. If someone wanted to check the spelling on Siegel and Shuster, Googling will only get them so far. If you go search for Siegel AND Schuster AND Superman, you get (at this moment) around 25,600 hits. I'm sure some of the people who got it wrong did that kind of search and interpreted that result as verification. So they print Joe's name as Schuster and now the next guy who "fact-checks" that way will find there are, like, 25,601 hits. In fact, I probably just added to the pile with this posting.

• Posted at 11:37 AM · LINK

Another Stan Lee Interview

Over on the Playboy website, there's a little chat with Stan Lee. Much of the talk about comics is fairly standard (and once again, someone can't spell the names of both Siegel and Shuster correctly) but you might be interested in Stan's comments about the War in Iraq. He's for an immediate withdrawal.

• Posted at 10:53 AM · LINK

Correction/Expanded Remarks

Kurt Bodden, who was also there last night at the W.C. Fields celebration, reminds me that there were a couple of brief mentions of alcohol in the panel discussion. I guess I was just amazed there was so little discussion of the man's drinking. Many years ago, as I recounted here, I got to meet and chat with Carlotta Monti, who was Fields's companion or mistress or whatever you want to call her. Obviously, she knew him better than most people and she spoke of his imbibing as akin to his breathing, and couldn't talk about him at all without mentioning it constantly.

Something I'm always wary of is the tendency to extrapolate a full portrait of someone based on a very brief contact with the person. I know a guy who'll tell you Phil Spector is (present-tense) a great and stable human being because that's how he was during their one fifteen minute encounter twenty-some-odd years ago. There are people I worked with and I got one impression of them the first week or two of our association...and a quite different one after a few more weeks or months.

I don't think it's always as easy to say what kind of person someone was...and certainly not via selected anecdotes. On top of that, as Leonard Maltin noted last night and has emphasized elsewhere, a lot of published histories are just plain wrong. People who should know what someone was like have been known to write fiction about them. At times, people even lie or get things horribly awry in autobiographies. A few years ago, a writer I knew quit a job co-writing the autobiography of a Famous Hollywood Figure because the F.H.F. kept insisting on his versions of certain events that were clearly disproven by surviving documentation, up to and including the time and place of his birth. You couldn't even believe what the Famous Hollywood Figure said about himself, let alone what casual acquaintances had to say.

Those of us who never met an important, compelling legend like W.C. Fields have to rely on the researchers and the memories of the dwindling number of folks who knew him. Some of what they say is certainly true and some probably isn't and to sort it all out is probably a better juggling act than even Fields himself ever performed. Which doesn't mean we shouldn't try. We should just recognize that it ain't as easy as we'd like it to be.

• Posted at 10:40 AM · LINK

Today's Video Link

Today's clip runs fifteen minutes and probably needs a mild warning of "adult content" for nudity and subject matter. So those of you who are physically or emotionally under eighteen, you're hereby forbidden to click the link...and I just know you won't.

In the early days of cable/pay TV, there was a short-lived but very wonderful series called Likely Stories that gave innovative filmmakers the chance to produce funny films on what sure seemed to be sufficient budgets. I'm not sure how many episodes aired on TV but they were later edited into four, little-seen volumes for home video. Among the famous folks who wrote and/or directed were Rob Reiner, Christopher Guest, Harry Shearer, Danny DeVito and David Jablin. Mr. Jablin seems to have been the main driving force behind the whole project...and whatever he did, he did well. The batting average of the films was pretty darn high but they didn't get the attention they deserved. I don't know if it was because cable was still getting its act together or because audiences rarely take to anthology formats...probably both.

Here's one of the segments — a bogus instructional film called "School, Girls and You," that was produced in or around 1983. Among the actors you'll recognize in it are Paul Reubens and Patrick Macnee, and I thought the whole thing was pretty funny. I'm not certain but I believe the film was directed by David Wechter.

• Posted at 9:58 AM · LINK

Corrections Upon Corrections

This is, let's hope, our last post about that Newsday story on comic strips that was woefully filled with outdated and incorrect information. The online version of the story was posted to the Newsday website on Thursday, May 3. Here is a link to that article which is, as of this moment, uncorrected. A few determined readers posted corrections in a section that's hard to spot and which I doubt many people read.

The gentleman who authored the article — a longtime Newsday editor and writer who's about to retire after forty years there, certainly didn't read the corrections. Or at least, he hadn't as of the following day when I phoned and told him there were problems with the article. He was quite surprised to hear there was anything wrong with the piece which, he said, he researched in a "comic encyclopedia" in the Newsday library. I directed him to this posting on my weblog here where I itemized most (not all) of the mistakes.

On Saturday, the article ran — errors and all — as a major cover story in a Newsday magazine section. I'm going to guess that this section was already printed or irrevocably "off to press" at the time I phoned the reporter the day before, and that he was powerless to change it.

The following Tuesday morning, May 8, this paragraph appeared in the online Newsday "corrections" section. As I explained here, I thought this was quite insufficient, starting with the fact that few people who read the article would ever see those corrections. I further noted that the original article was still online and still uncorrected.

As you can see, it still is. However, some time last week, another version of the same article popped up on the Newsday site with corrections inserted. Here it is. As with the paragraph in the "corrections" section, we still have the error of saying that Alex Raymond took over the Blondie strip after Chic Young died. I mentioned that in my posting but apparently if the reporter looked at what I wrote to get the other facts, he missed that one or simply decided not to correct it. There is also nothing to contradict the impression that Dan DeCarlo, Bill Zeigler, Allen Saunders and Stan Drake are still alive.

There were a few other things wrong with the original article but I've already spent too much time on this. I only spent any because I wanted to make this point. This is not unique and it's not a rare exception and it's not even the work of an intern with no experience. This is the way too many news sources in this country are. They get it all wrong and then grudgingly do a minimalist, almost covert correction if someone applies a little pressure and/or shame. Some papers these days don't even do that much. (Go ahead. Find me the online "corrections" section for The Washington Times.)

True, there's nothing earth-shattering about citing two dead guys as the current makers of Mary Worth...but this is pretty much the same level of accuracy that The New York Times managed for its coverage of the Whitewater scandal and its early reporting on the Iraq invasion. They did a partial mea culpa on the latter but the record in "The Newspaper of Record" is still scratched.

Lately, a lot of "real journalists" have been decrying bloggers because, among other insults, bloggers don't fact-check and aren't answerable to anyone. That's all true. There's at least as much nonsense and erroneous info in the blogs, probably more. But there's a lot less excuse.

• Posted at 9:35 AM · LINK

Godfrey Daniels!

I'm back from a nice evening at the Motion Picture Academy and a program all about W.C. Fields. The Academy has been hosting what I hear is an extraordinary exhibit of Fields artifacts and memorabilia, most of which was donated by the late comedian's family. I haven't seen it yet and if I'm going to, I'm gonna have to hustle. Sunday is the final day to view it.

Last night, the auditorium was about 60% packed for an entry in a series they call The Jack Oakie Celebration of Comedy in Film, which spotlights great funny folks. Leonard Maltin hosted the program which consisted of a series of Fields trailers, a clip from his 1927 silent film Running Wild, a panel discussion with folks who'd either worked with Fields or studied him, and a Fields feature film. The members of the panel were Jane Withers (who appeared briefly with W.C. in It's a Gift), Delmar Watson (who had a small role in You Can't Cheat an Honest Man), Jean Rouverol Butler (who played Fields's daughter in It's a Gift), Hal Kanter (who wrote briefly for some of Fields's radio appearances), film historian Joe Adamson and Fields's grandson, Ronald Fields.

The overriding theme of the discussion was that W.C. was a much nicer human being — especially towards children — than some histories have made him out to be. Three people on the panel worked with him when they were much younger...although Watson admitted he had almost no contact with the man. All reported good experiences with the man, which was nice to hear, though hardly definitive. Interestingly, in a half hour discussion of what kind of person W.C. Fields was, there was no mention whatsoever of alcohol.

The feature shown was The Old-Fashioned Way, a film Fields made in 1934 and — I think — one of his weaker efforts. In it, he plays The Great McGonigle, the con-artist head of a theatrical troupe that likes to skip out of town without paying its boarding house fees. The storyline doesn't make a whole lot of sense but it was still a joy to watch Fields go through his paces and, near the end, to do his juggling act as a semi-grand finale. I had a fine time but I came away wishing they'd run It's a Gift or The Bank Dick or You Can't Cheat An Honest Man instead. One of the folks involved in planning the program told me they'd selected The Old-Fashioned Way because it isn't seen as often as the others. That's true...but you almost never get to see any W.C. Fields movie these days on a big screen with a large, responsive audience. Back in the late sixties/early seventies, there were such screenings around town and I enjoyed them very much. Tonight made me really miss those opportunities.

• Posted at 1:48 AM · LINK