To its credit, the paper reported the hoax on the front page and admitted it had made no attempt to independently confirm the story. Steven Brill, chairman of American Lawyer Media, has made a fetish of prompt corrections that finger the editors and reporters responsible for mistakes. Last year, after his San Francisco Recorder failed to adequately correct a blunder involving a lawsuit against GM, he ran a front-page apology that criticized the publisher, executive editor, associate editor, and an editorial assistant by name for various sins, and suspended the associate editor for a week. And when Brill's Court TV inadvertently caused a mistrial by contacting jurors in an Austin case, the network broke into regular programming to report its misconduct. Most of us are a bunch of hypocrites.
Mistakes are inevitable in a business that processes millions of words and pictures each day.
If there's bad news, break it yourself. There's nothing worse than watching helplessly while rival media outlets slice you into little pieces. If you admit to a negative, you get credit for a positive. Eating a healthy serving of crow helps shift the spotlight from the original blunder to your valiant efforts to deal with it. A full confession also removes any taint of a coverup.