DENNIS MYERS Against the Grain Advertisement

In August a Las Vegas newspaper published a report on the effort by the Clark County district attorney to remove county recorder Frances Deane from office. The report contained this sentence: "The statute ... used, NRS [Nevada revised statute] 283.440, appears to have been employed only a handful of times, including to remove a county assessor in Carson City in 1962, Clark County's district attorney in 1950 and the Clark County treasurer in 1940.

The story was read by the administrator of Nevada's state archives, Guy Louis Rocha. That sentence leaped out at him because just a few weeks earlier, because of interest in a dispute involving the Washoe County assessor, he had done some research on the use of the statute in earlier years. He knew that, in fact, the treasurer had not been removed from office in 1940 and the district attorney had not been removed in 1950. He contacted the reporter to let him know. However, there apparently was no correction published.

There the matter rested until September rolled around. The Associated Press, a service that supplies news stories to media entities like newspapers and broadcasting stations and draws on those same entities for some of its stories, ran a story on the Deane case that included the material from the August newspaper report. Now, an error in one newspaper had been spread statewide and possibly (depending on how widely AP distributed the story) throughout the west or even the nation. It could end up in newspaper morgues (research files) and in files kept by political scientists, legislative researchers, historians -- the possibilities are endless.

For years, journalism reviews -- magazines that scrutinize the conduct of journalism -- have warned about the way technology is making it ever more easy to spread errors and lodge them in media research files. An incident like the August newspaper report was always a problem, but now errors are distributed more widely and rapidly. In July 1994 the American Journalism Review published an article titled "The Nexis Nightmare." It observed, "Mistakes that won't die. The same old experts. The endless repetition of anecdotes. Will reporters ever master the computerized morgue, or has it already mastered them?" In March 1998 the Columbia Journalism Review did a report on how, because of stories running on different editorial tracks (digital and print versions), an error that may be removed from a story before it hits print can still mistakenly end up in the online version.

Some newspapers have taken great care to make corrections. The New York Times will not only correct the online text of a story, but will leave the correction posted at the top of the story just in case, even though the story no longer contains the error.

I was curious how the original August newspaper story error was made, so I contacted the reporter who wrote it. He said he got the information he used from a Clark County deputy district attorney. I contacted her and she told me she got her information from the annotations of the state's statute books, Nevada Revised Statutes. These annotations are short paragraphs of information that appear at the bottom of the official wording of statutes. (These annotations appear in the printed versions of statutes put out by the Nevada Legislature, but not in the online versions that are posted by the legislature.)

I checked those annotations. They contain capsule descriptions of portions of court proceedings on previous uses of the statute, but not necessarily the final outcome. In fact, the process of trying to remove someone from office under the statute being used in the Deane case has been tried numerous times but has succeeded only once.

It's not clear whether the assistant DA provided incorrect information to the reporter, or the reporter extrapolated from the information the assistant DA gave him. But however it happened, the outcome was that the public got the wrong information. Does it matter? It was, after all, just one line in a longer story.

The problem is that so many stories contain such errors, and frequently they have consequences. In this case, the public can be given the impression that removal of an elected official has in the past been done more freely than actually happened, which can ease the process of reversing a public vote.