Journalistic errors and fake news are not the same thing

Although the damages and consequences may be quite similar, it is the context of production that sets them apart.

A print screen of Estadão correction page.

“A girl refuses to greet Bolsonaro during an Easter ceremony,” the newspaper O Estado de S. Paulo reported last Friday, 19th. Based on a video posted on the president’s Twitter, the newspaper pointed that “when he greets the children who were in the last row of the group, a girl crosses her arms and makes a negative signal with her head. The moment occurs at 28 seconds of the video”.

The news quickly turned into social networks. Pictures were spread associating the act with a photo of 1979 that became a symbol of resistance to the military dictatorship when a girl refused to greet the former president João Baptista Figueiredo.

What would be a story with high symbolic value became, two days later, a journalistic error.

On the 21st, the Estadão published a correction, in which points that it is not possible to say that the girl refused to greet the president.

The video — posted by the president on his Facebook and Twitter accounts — is covered by the sound of the National Anthem and it is not possible to hear clearly what Bolsonaro talks to the children. Estadão had access through a government source to the video with subtitles where it is possible to hear the president asking the children if they were Palmeiras (a Brazilian football team). It is in this context that the girl signals the negative to the president. The note was not published in the print version of the newspaper. The text has been corrected.

On the last sentence, it would be worth a correction of the correction, since the text was not corrected, but deleted. The newspaper excluded the original news from its website and this fact did not go unnoticed. On the 20th, therefore, one day before the correction, the Diário do Centro do Mundo website not only noted that the story was no longer online, but also questioned the “lack of an explanation for the disappearance”.

The exclusion of the news page did not prevent the wrong information from continuing to circulate, and this happens for two reasons: first because the news was released by Estadão Conteúdo agency and reproduced in several journalistic sites; and second because this is the internet dynamic: once online, it is almost impossible to delete the error trail. A quick search on Google shows that today, four days after the release of the correction, the news with the error still exists. I have selected an example of a newspaper, a website on the R7 portal, a video on YouTube, a post on Facebook, and a magazine post on Twitter. In all of them (and there are many other examples) there is no mention of the error.

It leads to three important consequences:

• Metrópoles website talked to the girl, and she said she’s afraid of going to school. The parents even voted for Bolsonaro. This only reinforces something that we know well, but that is not the object of proper ethical reflection in the professional routine: the journalistic error can cause harm to people’s lives.
• Estadão’s reporter is facing virtual harassment and had his photo released in pages that support Bolsonaro. This fact worries me not only as a journalist, but also as a teacher, since he is my former student and did not make the mistake intentionally — which leads me to the third point.
• The journalistic error was widely called fake news by right wing people and accounts, but they are not the same. This confusion benefited the government (which makes constant attacks on the press) and undermined not only Estadão credibility, but of journalism as a whole. I will explore this argument further.

Journalistic error is not fake news

Conceptually the journalistic error is not intentional. This is something that can happen in journalistic practice, often by lack of verification procedures (as it was in this case), other times by a source misunderstanding, etc. But in theory the news organisation does not want to make a mistake (and here I am not talking about manipulation, which is another concept). In my Master’s dissertation, I tried to define a concept of journalistic error:

Technically and ethically speaking, the journalistic error is the inaccuracy, falsification or imprecision in a news publication, caused by negligence, recklessness or malpractice. The non-admission of the error or its deliberate occurrence affect the quality and credibility of the journalistic product in relation to the audience or to other interested groups.

In this definition, what I call “deliberate occurrence”, that is, when something is done deliberately, approaches the understanding of fake news (in 2014, when I defended the dissertation, this discussion was still incipient in Brazil). But although they have similar consequences — they affect quality and credibility — they are not synonymous.

And there is yet another important conceptual ingredient: there is a consensus among scholars that the expression “fake news” is too vague to describe the disturbance of contemporary information, as Taís Seibt said in this article. It is more accurate to speak of misinformation.

The typology created by Claire Wardle reiterates my argument that journalistic error and fake news are different concepts. She points to seven types of mis and disinformation: satire or parody, false connection, misleading content, false context, impostor content, manipulated content, and fabricated content. Even if the first one (satire or parody) does not necessarily have the intention of confusing, its production presumes the acknowledgment that the content does not correspond to the reality.

Thus, although the damage and consequences of journalistic error and fake news may be quite similar, it is the context of production that sets them apart. The news or information made by a news organisation is intended to be factually true and, although the error may be discovered later, it has not been released for that purpose. Fake news, on the other hand, has the deliberate aspect of disinformation, using for example the wrong context or manipulation.

It should be noted that such conceptual differentiation does not make the journalistic error less serious. Misunderstandings in news gathering, interference of external elements, ideological reasons — which are some of the causes of the error — are very worrying and, in my opinion, they do not yet have the attention they deserve from the news organisations.

In the case of this article, the confusion is even greater, as there was also a fake news (or deliberate misinformation). According to the Lupa agency, a video with a false subtitle attributed to the girl began to circulate in the social networks: “I will not talk to you,” she would have told Bolsonaro. That is, although the news was the result of a journalistic error — and not a fake news — there was also the circulation of intentional misinformation.

Correction procedures

That is such a complex news environment. And how did the news organisations correct the story? At this point the procedures are diverse and often confusing, which indicates lack of standard correction (something I also identified in my research there in 2014). Here are some examples:

• As we have seen, Estadão has published a three paragraph correction, in which it says vaguely that the story has been corrected (but in fact it has been deleted). The newspaper should have detailed more the causes of the error, as this increases transparency and helps in the understanding of the context. What really happened is that the newspaper misinterpreted the images and didn’t check the information properly. Without the audio of Bolsonaro’s dialogue with the children it was not possible to reach that conclusion, although we have to highlight the strenght of the images in the induction to the error. And instead of deleting the news, the newspaper should have posted the correction in the same URL as the original story, contextualizing and explaining to the audience what happened.
• UOL portal kept the original URL, but changed the headline to “Bolsonaro greets children during Easter ceremony”, which is weird because, outside the context of the error, this information is not newsworthy. In this sense, Lupa headline is accurate: “Girl did not refuse to greet Bolsonaro in an Easter event.” The story published by UOL is the Estadão correction, but the original news simply disappears.
• Carta Capital kept the original headline, the wrong story and only in the last paragraph, without any highlighting, added: “On Sunday (21), the Estadão reported that it had access, through a government source, to the video with subtitle where it is possible to hear the president asking the children if they were Palmeiras. It is in this context that the girl signals the negative to the president”. Since many people only read the news headline, it is very risky to put the correction at the end, as if it were just another paragraph of the story. It is a direct relation of proportionality: the more confused the context of the error, the more transparent its correction must be.
• Veja and Estado de Minas published more appropriate corrections. The first one added a “no” to the original URL, but both lead to the corrected story (which contributes to search engines indexing). The headline is “Girl did not refuse to greet Bolsonaro during ceremony,” the text explains that Veja reproduced the Estadão content and then comes the correction. The Estado de Minas headline is also good (Report finds that girl did not refuse to greet Bolsonaro in ceremony) and the text is modified in order to explain the error. The big problem of Estado de Minas was to have kept in another URL the original wrong news, even without any mention of the error.

For the above examples, it is possible to realise the lack of correction standards, which can generate audiences misunderstandings and end up contributing to the misinformation. In order to solve this, I reproduce below an excerpt of the correction policy I worked on in my Master’s dissertation, which seems to be up to date:

• When discovered, the error must be corrected without subterfuge. The correction should be done as soon as possible as it generates trust and credibility.
• The rectification must necessarily be disseminated through the same channels in which the incorrect information has been released (social networks, website, blogs, etc.).

When identifying the error, the following procedures must be followed:

• In cases of information errors (which may be a word or even the whole news), the text of the correction should be put in the original news, visible on the page.
• In case of news that is completely false, inaccurate or incorrect, it is possible to replace it with a complete explanation, mentioning the error. The headline can be modified to alert about the correction, and all this procedure is done in the same URL (without the creation of new disconnected links with the original news).
• The text of the correction should be clear and objective. It is recommended to inform the time when the news remained in error, to match the audience that read it at different times. For example: “From (x) hour to (x) hour, we incorrectly report that (…). However, the correct information is (…) and the error occurred because (…). The text has been corrected. We apologize to our audience”.
• News should never be deleted, even if it contains serious journalistic errors. Trying to erase the error trail is never the best solution.

This article was first published in Observatório da Ética Jornalística (OBJETHOS).