The Correction

The correction ran to four lines at the foot of page two, and it said that the figure given in an article eleven days earlier had been wrong by a factor of ten. It named the article. It named the figure, and it gave the right one. What it did not do, because corrections never do, was reach the people who had read the original.

Hallgren, who had written the article, had noticed the error himself on the second day and had reported it the same afternoon. The delay of nine days was not his and was not anybody’s in particular: it was the ordinary time that a correction takes when nobody is angry about it and nothing depends on it being quick.

Mireille, who edited the section, argued that the correction should run in the same place as the article, which had been on the front of the second section rather than at the foot of page two. The answer she was given was not unfair. The front of a section is where today’s news goes, and a correction is not news.

There was an argument that would have worked, and she thought of it only afterwards. The wrong figure had been quoted twice in the eleven days, once by a member of a committee and once in a letter to the paper itself, and both quotes had appeared before the correction did.

A correction, she said later, is not a repair. It is a record that a repair was attempted. Whether it reaches anybody at all depends on where it is printed, and that decision is made by people who are thinking about tomorrow rather than about the eleven days that have already gone.