It's in the P-I

The Seattle Post-Intelligencer's editorial page editor Mark Trahant in Sunday's column:

Our goal is to reduce factual errors -- even on the opinion page.

Humans aren't perfect and we'll always get some things wrong.

But our political discourse is always better when we start a conversation sharing the same set of basic facts. Then, based on that information, we use our various world views to reach a conclusion.

I think the best way to do this is to listen closely to our critics. Especially those readers who pick apart our ideas, spelling or grammar word by word and sentence by sentence. Then we can figure out how to do it better next time.

We'll still make mistakes. When we do, we ought to clue readers in on our error right away. Then we might learn something and stop making that mistake -- so we can move on to new ones.

I think that's the right attitude for an opinion editor to have, and I appreciate Trahant's humility and light-hearted self-deprecation.

As far as I can tell, the P-I has never acknowledged any of their mistakes that I have pointed out in the past, although perhaps they will in the future. It would also help if they took responsibility for cleaning up after some of the fact-resistant syndicated columnists they publish, such as Robert Fisk, Helen Thomas, Alex Cockburn, Ted Rall, etc.

Posted by Stefan Sharkansky at November 24, 2003 09:50 AM