NEWS ACCURACY IN SWITZERLAND AND ITALY

Abstract

Nearly 80 years of accuracy research in the United States has documented that the press frequently errs, but empirical study about news accuracy elsewhere in the world is absent. This article presents an accuracy audit of Swiss and Italian daily regional newspapers. Replicating US research, the study offers a trans-Atlantic perspective of news accuracy. To compare newspaper accuracy in Switzerland and Italy to longitudinal accuracy research in the United States, the study followed closely the methodology pioneered by Charnley (1936) and adapted by Maier (2005). News sources found factual inaccuracy in 60 percent of Swiss newspaper stories they reviewed, compared to 48 percent of US and 52 percent of Italian newspapers examined. The results show that newspaper inaccuracy—and its corrosive effect on media credibility—transcends national borders and journalism cultures. Nowadays, digitization offers new ways of implementing correction policies. Media organizations need, however, to adapt to these changes and to adapt their structures in particular to new forms of participative and interactive two-way communication.

Keywords:

• accuracy
• credibility
• digitization
• journalism
• journalism cultures

Notes

1. For methodological consistency, Maier's US accuracy study adheres as closely as possible to the objective and subjective error categories established by Charnley and his successors. In The Vanishing Newspaper, Meyer (2004) took a different approach to classifying objective and subjective errors, So, while drawing from the same data set, their accuracy rates somewhat differ though their overall conclusions concur.

2. The 14 US newspapers included in the analysis: Aberdeen American News, Boulder Daily Camera, Charlotte Observer, Columbus Ledger-Examiner, Detroit Free Press, Detroit News, Grand Forks Herald, Lexington Herald-Leader, Miami Herald, Palm Beach Post, Philadelphia Daily News, Philadelphia Inquirer, San Jose Mercury News, and the South Florida Sun-Sentinel.

3. The circulation of the regional dailies in the Swiss and Italian sample is similar: in Switzerland it varied between 203,636 (Tages-Anzeiger) and 83,773 copies (Basler Zeitung). In Italy the circulation ranged from 196,048 (Resto del Carlino) to 57,419 copies (Giornale di Brescia).

4. Even if in Switzerland the Basler Zeitung has a lower circulation than the Neue Luzerner Zeitung or the St. Galler Tagblatt (Verband Schweizer Medien, 2011), the economic status of Basel is much higher compared to the other two cities (Swiss Federal Statistical Office, 2001). Moreover, the Basler Zeitung belongs to an independent media organization (the Basler Medien AG), while the Neue Luzerner Zeitung and the St. Galler Tagblatt are part of the AG für die Neue Zürcher Zeitung. The Berner Zeitung, in contrast, belongs to tamedia AG, the publisher of the Tages-Anzeiger. But, again, the economic region of Bern is too important to ignore.

5. In Detroit, where the two dailies (Detroit Free Press and Detroit News) operate under a joint agency, and in Philadelphia, where two dailies (Philadelphia Daily News and Philadelphia Inquirer) are jointly owned, the morning and evening newspapers were combined into a single 400-person sample.

6. The US accuracy study, which elicited a 68 percent response rate, used a robust solicitation technique that included an email invitation, a reminder postcard and mailing three questionnaires to non-respondents.

7. The Italian sample initially contained newspapers from the South and the North in order to respect possible cultural gaps. But after having experienced a response rate of only 5 percent from sources cited in the Giornale di Sicilia, we decided to take the Secolo XIX, another newspaper from the North, instead of the Gazzetta del Mezzogiorno from the South.

8. This index, which draws from the ASNE 16-item semantic differential scale, is a close variation of the newspaper believability index developed by Meyer (1988) and found to be reliable and empirically valid (West, 1994). This approach provides a cohesive measure of credibility (Cronbach α=0.95) and eliminates items of the ASNE scale that are arguably superfluous (i.e., whether a paper is “patriotic” and “moral”).

9. See, for instance, advice on best practices by “Media Bugs”: http://mediabugs.org/pages/best-practices-in-error-reporting-and-corrections.