The Problem of Misinformation, Inaccurate Reporting, and Bias in the Newspapers of Once, Demand a Critical Approach for Historians Today

Birch Hollow Photo by Suzanne Currie

  I was a writer and editor with Muskoka Publications, in Bracebridge, from 1979 to 1989 and then an Editor with the competition for another half year before I'd retired to pursue my dream career as an antique dealer. So here I was having two poorly paying professions and no paid holidays or free staff coffee. Antique dealers might be rich when they start out, especially having retired from dentistry or the legal profession, but at the time I left newspaper employ, I hadn't really built up much equity, and my antique collection sold outright, at that particular moment in my flimsy biography barely more than a page and a half, would have at maximum earned me about five thousand dollars. I've never let poverty and poor earnings thwart ambition. I grew up with a pay cheque to pay cheque family existence, and I didn't have socks without holes, pants with knees, and sweaters that weren't stretched down to the top of my knees. But my mother stressed the importance of stretching the clothing budget, but by golly, we Curries ate like kings. We had roast beef every Sunday, alternated with ham, chicken and turkey on special occasions. So being a freelance writer working for "whatever" and selling antiques "whenever" was a little precarious but workable. Suzanne was by then a full time secondary school teacher in Bracebridge, so it would be wrong of me to suggest we weren't doing well enough to afford my role as "Mr. Mom," for both boys, while tending our small Bracebridge shop, and writing on-spec, feature stories for the local press when they had a few holes to fill. I worked freelance with Muskoka Publications from the very early 1990's right to the turn of this new century, before I found some more lucrative gigs.

     The point of this post is not whether I starved in either profession, during those years, but what I did as a freelancer working quite literally at the sales counter of the early days Birch Hollow Antiques, where I had lots of time between customers. When September rolled around I had much more free time, while looking after son Robert, (Andrew was already at Bracebridge Public School), and it was actually a rather neat place to work and research heritage features, being quite fitting to my themes of local history, being of course, the basement in the former W.W. Kinsey - Undertaker and Furniture Sales location on upper Manitoba Street. It was amazingly quiet and yes, quite spirited, just not as much as the McGibbon house, just down the street, had afforded me a few years earlier.

     From the spring of 1990 until the spring of 1995, I probably wrote two hundred or more heritage feature stories, and launched my long running column in The Muskoka Advance, entitled "Historic Sketches of Bracebridge, which took me up to 2000. I developed templates for two future books, and compiled the first history of the Bracebridge Senior Citizens Club, which, for your information, got me a lot of local praise but no Pulitzer. I really enjoyed this six day a week freedom (Suzanne often did Saturdays and many days through the summer season) working at the shop, as I still do, but now in Gravenhurst, and I spent a huge amount of time buried in the texts of published histories where there were many feature stories projects waiting to be put together for a contemporary re-introduction to local readership. I worked through stacks of old newspapers from several long time publishers in the community, and as we were known for our large collection of published Muskoka histories, we sold to collectors, I had a wonderful archives at my beck and call. When I was a writer with The Herald-Gazette and Muskoka Sun, back a few years, I used to spend many hours a month in the basement at 27 Dominion Street, where a huge volume of old newspapers were stored for our use. And oh boy, did I love to bury myself in these weekly profiles of community life and times, dating back to the late 1800's. I probably found editorial material for a thousand or more stories and heritage series because we had those resources available to us for research purposes.

     As major Muskoka collectors, buyers and sellers of regional histories and collectables, and still writing district chronicles, I have, come to the conclusion after all these years, that I had missed one truly important aspect of my research due diligence. Now for me, a very prolific writer of these regional histories, I have most recently found myself refuting many of my own editorial contributions, dating back to the first years I began cranking this stuff out in the early 1990's. And it's what is presently a very serious topic in the news gathering profession. Truth versus fiction. Falsehoods that are accepted as truths, and errors that have become so deeply imbedded in often repeated stories, that it is almost impossible to correct more than just the few that are easily addressed. But folks, this is not a new phenomenon or something that has just manifested because of the outcry about "fake news" and "election lie," resounding loud and clear from south of the border. I have, over the past year, thought about this, and whether or not it was all something that emerged when the last president of the United States began his assault on the fake media, and their misrepresentations of the truth; as seen by some, being the polar opposite to what others understood as the truth. I thought about one stark reality of the print media, going back to my days submitting ten to twenty stories for each issue. Only about five ever had my byline.

     When we put out the paper each week, the editorial department, of course, was responsible for accuracy in content, and that involved numerous stages of oversight, that carried right on to the actual proofreading of the finished flats, laid-out by the composing department, which had to be approved by those who wrote the material originally, and for myself, the person who edited the paper as noted on the masthead just below "Publisher." There were serious legal implications of making an error in any of our news stories, and serious personal ramifications, if we botched a cutline beneath a photograph, or screwed up an important anniversary date, but most of all, if we incorrectly spelled a name. It's when I learned that spelling the name "Ray" is not a standard spelling you can take for granted. Rae and Wray for example. But not matter how dutiful our news staff was, there was always a mistake that snuck through and made us feel like crap the next day, when the papers hit the news stand, and minutes later, the first calls came in from angry folks who had been slighted by one typo or misspelling of a name or a dozen in a feature story or, best of all, an obituary. Imagine how the editor must have felt, to read the front page headline about a local visit by former Prime Minister Pierre Turdeau. "Turd" Get it! Then there was the caption beneath a photograph of a beautiful young lady at a pageant at one of the local schools. "This charming young lay...." How does an editor handle that call from the girl's mother, who has every right to ask, "who the heck proof read that cutline before it went to the printer...you dolt! So here is the real problem that I appreciate more now that I did back then. Typos are one thing, but errors in the copy of a news story or historical feature can be a huge chronicle altering reality a long, long way down the pike. It's not like I didn't know this potential many years ago, and did of course take precautions, but today it rattled my comfort zone with what-ifs and how are these mistakes over centuries in print, especially, affecting the true story of history generally. Here's what has happened in research complacency.

     Although I have long been nervous about taking past newspaper coverage, as gospel, and never not being suspicious errors could have been made that could trip me up, in historical accuracy, there are times when cross referencing doesn't appear to be necessary especially if there are other sources that seem to corroborate the facts. I can remember once when we ran a rather serious news story with a town council slant, that had contained numerous reporting errors that unfortunately we didn't find out until councillors got a whack at the published version and raised hell about the misleading information. After reprimanding the writer of the story, and apologizing to the offended members of council, making a deal to write a corrected version for the next issue, I would discover later that evening a local television stringer, (a good friend of ours) had taken the meat of the story-in-error and presented it in film his report for the dinner time news. He had not checked with us first before running the story with supporting film coverage, which for me, necessitated many more apologies and a reprimand to my film colleague for grabbing an easy story at our expense. Wrong on two counts. We screwed up and so did he, and it is just one example of how errors make it to accepted thought. The problem of course is that many people who read the original story, and saw the film coverage, did not read the correction or see the re-made news clip on television.

     So when you think about the plethora of errors that made it to print over several earlier centuries, much of the material I worked through for most of two decades, plus, it does bother me now that I hadn't practiced even greater due diligence to question key assertions and known facts, that may have been corrected in issues I didn't have access to, or known that errors had been left uncorrected forever. Thus the authors of many of the books that I have been marketing since the 1970's, have also been tainted by the kind of trust that got me in trouble in my editorial stint; some having been corrected while others were not. It's the case that many historians in generations to come will also continue making the same errors in their research that I did, and other authors committed without knowing it, taken from the mistakes from reporters in the past, who either unintentionally misrepresented facts, or committed the kind of typographical errors, in dates and times, of events, that have already rippled to the surface of contemporary times. Fake news. Not intentionally, but it's true there are many serious inaccuracies that have survived the test of time, having never been addressed as being in error. The errors, misspelling of names, incorrect descriptions, physical accounts that were factually incorrect, and a million other misadventures of writers and historians in succession, first in newsprint, and then sent recklessly to contaminate history ongoing that may have serious consequences years down the road; when the error of once, simply can't match the truths of the present tense. The ripple effect. Oh boy! I've got some backtracking to do!