PressEthic

Jach Shafer has a typically insightful Press Box column about the difference between objectivity and accuracy:

In theory, objectivity is a terrific concept: By considering all the facts impartially and presenting them in a balanced and fair manner, you find the truth. But journalistic objectivity fractures when its practitioners get many important details right—as the Times reporters have in their Duke dispatches—but still manage to botch the essence of the story. As long as they satisfy themselves that they've been objective and accurate in the presentation of facts, newspapers have no elegant mechanism for saying, "Whoops!" and correcting course. Instead, newspapers tend to reinforce their mistakes in judgment or ignore them until the noise from critics forces them to confess to a kind of journalistic malpractice.

Shafer suggests one form mea culpas might take.

But he doesn't delve into the way newspapers might come to discover that their coverage is flawed. It seems to me that pointing out when newspapers report facts right but get a story's essence wrong is one useful function of blogs -- a function that is ignored by blog skeptics like the dean of Columbia Journalism School.