READERS REPORT: There are days when it's difficult to maintain a positive approach to this job. In the run-up to last month's referendum, we received several angry calls, including one from a woman who believes that the members of staff of this newspaper are "mass murderers".
Judging by the tone and volume, as well as the content, silence was the only appropriate response. However, some demand a response and sometimes nothing less than my full agreement with their opinions will do. They cannot accept the possibility that there can be other, equally valid, points of view. In times of referendums (please don't call to say it should be referenda - either is acceptable) and general elections, accusations of bias abound and few callers are disposed to listen to reason.
During the past month, among those who called to disagree, sometimes vehemently, with editorials and opinion columns on the abortion referendum, were a few who said those opinions were "biased". Which is bewildering, given that opinion, by definition, is biased in favour of one side or the other.
But to accuse this newspaper of bias in its news reporting is another matter entirely. Any complaints of this nature warrant investigation. We had two on our referendum coverage and, although neither caller was specific enough to enable an investigation, I did talk to the news editor, Willy Clingan.
"We have no agenda," he said. "Our only aim is to get it right and that means presenting the news as accurately and as neutrally as we can. Of course, we also want to get it first but we'd prefer to be second and right rather than first and wrong. Bias suggests putting a spin or slant on the news and that would involve deviating from this principle."
To ensure fairness and balance, Clingan himself kept a day-by-day column centimetre account of the coverage of all strands in the campaign, which was circulated daily to the editor, duty editor, political editor, picture editor and chief sub-editor.
Sometimes, the daily figures showed the coverage to be weighted in favour of one side. For instance, in the early days of the campaign, the No campaigners were much more active than the Yes side and thus inevitably got more coverage. "Though we bent over backwards to allocate space to the Yes campaign, we could not make up events," said Clingan. By polling day, however, the Yes side had made up a lot of ground in terms of volume of coverage, as it stepped up its campaign in the final weeks. The same safeguards, Clingan says, will be in place when the general election is declared. He will ensure that, by and large, the coverage for each political party will reflect the support it has from the electorate.
HOW many errors can you find in today's Irish Times? Yes, one or two readers do seem to look on it as a game. They appear to delight in pointing triumphantly to mistakes and get cross when they don't see corrections. So how do we decide which errors to correct?
There are two criteria that take priority. If the reputation of a person or organisation has been unfairly damaged, a correction is essential and attempts are made to publish it straight away.
And if a factual error has the potential to significantly alter the record, it will be followed up with a correction.
After that, it is a matter of judgment. For instance, a person's name is very important to them and thus we will always respond positively to a complaint from the person whose name we have got wrong. Or if mistakes will inconvenience readers, i.e. wrong venue or time, corrections will be published.
Sometimes we are asked to "correct" omissions. I try to explain to readers, sometimes unsuccessfully, that to "correct" omissions would result in a newspaper with very little fresh news. Given that we can print only about a tenth of the information we receive, only if a central fact has been omitted from a story, will it be "corrected".
And not all significant errors are corrected in the corrections and clarifications column. Some matters can be rectified by publishing a letter to the editor, or by way of a follow-up story if, for instance, more information has since come to light that is considered newsworthy.
Some Crosaire crossword fans were very disappointed on the St Patrick's bank holiday to discover that the wrong grid accompanied their crossword. I'm sure it was cold comfort to them that, though this mistake did happen too often in the past, it is now a rare event. Neither indeed would they have been consoled by the fact that it was spotted and corrected between editions. As a long-time devotee of Crosaire, I had every sympathy with those who received an early edition.
Lest itt be thought that this job has no compensations, some complaints lead to very interesting investigations. For instance, a recent e-mail, pointing out that the published details of a television documentary were wrong (the result of incorrect information supplied to us), resulted in an hour-long odyssey through books and the internet searching for information about events in the Far East during the second World War.
In the course of this, I read some heart-rending but wonderful internet sites that provided information on events in Borneo and commemorations for hundreds of Australian and other Allied soldiers who died there in a prisoner-of-war camp in 1942. Another voyage of discovery instigated by an inquiry about the old Cló Gaelach resulted in nostalgia for the old séimhiú (or buailte, depending on where you learnt your Irish).
I had forgotten how much easier it was to read Irish texts before its replacement by the ubiquitous "h". And last month's howler, "pubic libraries", was a source of great amusement to some readers but not a little embarrassment to the sub-editor concerned.
Mary O'Brien is Assistant Reader's Representative of The Irish Times. Readers'Report appears on the first Monday of the month