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David Cay Johnston, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter who knows as much about taxes as pretty much any journalist in America, made a mistake. He read through the annual reports of Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. and discovered that despite earning billions, the company appeared to be not only paying no taxes, but getting fat refunds. This wasn't surprising, since other big corporations, most notably General Electric, have managed the same thing. So Johnston wrote a column about it.But it turns out that Johnston was wrong about News Corp. It was an honest mistake, and here's the explanation:
In 2007, News Corp. switched from reporting its taxes paid as positive numbers to negative numbers by putting parentheses around them. Parentheses, Johnston pointed out, customarily represent negative numbers (though that's not set in stone), and News Corp. had decided to report the taxes as negatives since it had paid them. The company retroactively changed its reports for 2005 and 2006, as well, which it notes in its 2007 filing: "Certain fiscal 2006 and fiscal 2005 amounts have been reclassified to conform to the fiscal 2007 presentation."Johnston obviously cares very much about his reputation and is working hard to correct the error. But I was intrigued by this tweet from NPR's Steve Inskeep: "Johnston repeated his claim @MorningEdition so we asked him to return Thu to make the correction as prominent as the error."That's absolutely the appropriate thing to do. But I have to ask: when was the last time NPR did this when a politician or a spin-meister lied on their program? I'm pretty sure the answer is "never." Obviously, if a politician is asked to come on a program to apologize for saying something incorrect, they're likely to just say no thanks. But it's certainly a principle news organizations could apply to their own mistakes. There are few things more toothless than a newspaper's correction box, where even the most atrocious errors are tucked away in a place nobody ever reads. Why not say that if an error appeared on the front page, the correction will appear on the front page? And of course, television news programs almost never do corrections at all."I probably read that disclosure and just didn’t realize what it was reporting," Johnston said. "This is very finely detailed stuff. I missed that they switched the number. It isn’t common practice, and I shouldn’t have missed it. At the end of the day, the fact is, I shouldn’t have missed it." Johnston said he should have seen that the numbers had shifted from positive to negative from one year to the next, but he didn't. Now, he's hustling to set the record straight. "I’m going to be on NPR tomorrow, I called The Ed Show, which had me on, to ask them to send out my statement, and a link to the column," he said. "Everybody makes mistakes, the issue is how you deal with correcting them."
