Why can’t journalists apologize properly?

When deleting your tweets = chocolate teapot.

A couple of weeks back the Associated Press found itself in a thundering turdstorm of criticism after it ran an overcooked but basically legitimate story on Hillary Clinton, the Clinton Foundation. The real criticism wasn’t so much over the story but the framing: in particular this tweet:

The backlash, summarized well by the Washington Post, largely focused on the fact that the story hinted at pay-for-play (scandal!) but didn’t really have the meat to back it up—and, in particular that the “more than half” was downright misleading because it focused on a small sliver of very specific meetings.

…the data omitted more than 1,700 meetings Clinton had with world leaders as secretary of state. If 1,700 becomes the denominator, then 85 people comprise 5 percent of 1,700 meetings — rather than representing “more than half” of 154.

Today, the AP standards police announced that the original tweet is being deleted. Instead, the replacement is this:

Along with this little qualifier:

But o! what a crappy non-apology this is. Note the Twitter card, which basically repeats the same misleading information that got the original tweet deleted. Note the fact that it doesn’t say that 5% of people Clinton met with in the period examined also contributed to the Foundation (which would have arguably been more accurate.) Note how it uses the wonkish term “discretionary meetings,” which is procedurally more correct—but doesn’t alter the thrust of the message. It’s a perfect work of dark art.

The issue here is that this is neither really an apology or analysis of an error: it’s just a note that an error was made.

As any journalist who’s had to write an apology or clarification will admit—although maybe only over a drink, or when they’ve quit their job to go and try their hand at PR or pretend to be a farmer or just gone and hidden in the corner babbling wildly—the reality is that most of the time you are writing an apology you are absolutely trying your hardest not to apologize at all. You’re trying to write a get-out that allows you to back out gracefully, or avoid a lawsuit, or get people off your back—while also still feeling kind-of OK with yourself. Usually this is because you still believe that you’re right, just that you’ve been caught being kind-of wrong. Sometimes you are right; but it’s nearly always a game of trying to say enough without saying too much.

(Truth is most people who bother to read corrections or clarifications are smart enough to see through this; or they don’t care.)

So here’s the honest answer. Sometimes you fuck a story up from the bottom to the top. Other times you screw up the promotion, or you choose a bad headline, or you’re too close to the story to understand that you’re confusing readers.

But even if we accept that, yes, people make mistakes, the important question is never really whether a mistake was made: It’s why the mistake was made.

Most apologies never deal with that. It’s nearly always some act of God-like “editing error” or “deadline pressure” (these are both choices, not acts of nature.) The reality is usually more venal, and therefore less palatable: We thought we saw a story that nobody else had. We needed the attention. We juiced it. We got some facts wrong, but we know the headline is what people really share or care about or get motivated by. So we were wrong, but we probably knew we were wrong at the same moment we were doing the wrong thing. We just thought we could get away with it for long enough.

This isn’t to say that there aren’t genuine dumb-headed editing errors, or slips made by reading or writing too fast (I’ve been on the receiving end of a few of those, and probably dealt a few out as well.) But if we expect the world to be honest with us, we have to be honest back.

That would probably have been a more honest thing for the AP to say today. But then it would have to admit that it is as desperate for attention as the rest of the media, and that it is just as screwed up about the election as almost everyone else is.