PERISCOPE

By Val Schaffner

One of the hazards of the newspaper business is that your mistakes go out into the world reproduced by the thousands, for everyone to see, multiply mortifying and undeniable.

In a conversation you can backtrack or change the subject, and anyway the faux pas leaves no enduring record. If you are a politician you can claim you never said it or that you were quoted out of context.

My colleague Jack Graves had an excellent rejoinder to this complaint: "If you didn't say it you should have."

Television journalists can usually rely on the fact that their words tend to go in one ear and out the other; few viewers go to the trouble of taping the errors or demanding a transcript. When a newspaper fumbles, the clear evidence will inevitably hit the stands next Thursday, or tomorrow. A correction may follow, but there is no correcting the author's embarrassment.

When I was 21 and starting out as a reporter, my very first gaffe concerned a recently deceased Springs man whose name (though I do not exactly recall it now) might have been Bennett Lester. Throughout his obituary, as published, I identified him as Lester Bennett, enduring the wrath of his family with abject humility.

The problem, sometimes, was that my written notes were barely legible, even to me. "Hen's tracks," according to my editor, the late Everett Rattray. In a column on reportorial techniques, he remarked, concerning the contents of my notebooks: "Woe to the grand jury that subpoenas these jottings."

There are errors of fact, which can't be lived down, and errors of emphasis, of what you choose to play and where in the story you play it, that at least are matters of opinion. A town attorney accused me once of "shoddy reporting with Faustian overtones." At least I was being disparaged in style.

Anyway, as Everett used to say, "If both the Republicans and the Democrats are mad at you, you must be doing something right."

Both often were. Later I took it as a sign I was getting better at the job when, on occasion, after I had interviewed a particular candidate in one party or the other, the candidate himself would thank me for summing up his views so effectively, while someone from the other party would thank me for exposing the interview subject as the fraudulent windbag and charlatan he so transparently was.

Around that time, I happened to encounter at an East Hampton restaurant a local politician (since risen to greater prominence) who at the outset of her career had appeared to resent my early coverage, and after joining her for a couple of drinks I felt bold enough to state: "You have to realize, when you were first starting out in politics, and I was first starting out in journalism, I didn't know what I was doing any more than you did."

I'm quoting myself only because critics both of the press and of politicians often don't give us, or them, the benefit of supposing that our mistakes, or theirs, are often made honestly, the result of inexperience, or unavoidable haste, not of corrupt (Faustian?) intent.

At least I hope so. I have been on the receiving end, too. A couple of years ago, there was a minor scandal concerning the land on which I built my house, part of which had been conveyed to me with a document containing an apparently fake signature (the purported signer had been dead many years by the time this deed was dated).

Julia Mead of The Star reported this complicated matter with every detail impressively correct. The following week, another local publication (one that is given away free in the certain knowledge that no one would buy it) paid her article the compliment of copying its gist in a story that contained no original material whatever save for a number of accreted errors, including spelling my name three different ways and describing my heavily wooded property as farmland.

Yet it was the august New York Times that dealt me the ultimate blow, identifying me in an article on another topic, in the Long Island section, as "the late Val Schaffner."

As the saying goes, better late than never. But I phoned the editor. "Hello," I said, "this is the late Val Schaffner." By way of amends, he sent his reporter Mary Cummings to interview me about a book I had just published, and although the book never sold particularly well (at the moment, in fact, it ranks 1,930,279th on the Amazon.com best-seller list), the article re-established my place among the living at gratifying, accurate length.

Computers put a new twist on reliable journalism. Spell-checkers have eliminated most of the typos that used to elude tired proofreaders at The New York Times, for example, but are not yet sophisticated enough to detect a misused "whom" or a correctly spelled blooper. One week my reference to fascistic "Greek Colonels" came out as "Greek Colonials" - leading a letter writer to inquire where this hybrid architectural style could be viewed.

Occasionally a confusion between file names even causes an article submitted by e-mail to be switched with another bearing a similar tag, as happened in this space two weeks ago, when a previous column was inadvertently reprinted.

Such a mistake is easily amended by publishing the correct submission in the next issue (as mine was to have been last week), but it raises the troubling question of why no one complained.

The only thing worse than standing corrected is going unread. One reader did remark, somewhat reassuringly, that she really liked the piece, but that it sounded kind of familiar.

The practice of journalism is somewhat akin to that of dropping stones into a pond. You usually make a splash, but only when you hit a frog on the head do you hear a croak.