The Globe and Mail overhauled its website this past week. Excitement ensued. Then-editor-in-chief Edward Greenspon took the opportunity, via an embedded streaming video, to laud some of the snazzy new features the website sports, including a more colourful presentation, different page layouts, etc. All very nice, but one can’t help but notice there is something more fundamental that they are missing.

Recall earlier this year: a flurry of furrow-browed lamentations about the impending death of … perhaps it was journalism, or perhaps the news media, or perhaps investigative news reporting or perhaps … well, something was on its way out, and its imminent passing was going to have very negative repercussions indeed. These days, cris de coeur of that sort are passingly rare, evaporating, like that swine flu pandemic you might have heard about, as so much smoke on the wind. Perhaps Bold! New! Initiatives! like www.globeandmail.com have calmed the jitters among the fourth estate. But technological razzle will do little to stanch the bleeding at the core of the news media, because they do nothing to address a critical issue – the erosion of trust in the accuracy of the news.

Good relationships, flourishing relationships, are built on trust. Trust itself requires work: it can get built up a little at a time, link by link to form binding chains (I extend a courtesy to you, you do a nice thing for me, we begin to trust each other). Occasionally trust is swept away in a single moment (you cheat me, I betray you), but more often it is simply degraded over time (motivations behind actions begin to be questioned, minor deceits coalesce into an atmosphere of infidelity). When it comes to trust, little things matter.

Trust, the news media, and technology intersect at a rather surprising and lowly site: the “corrections” section of the newspaper. I call it lowly because that’s certainly how newspapers seem to think of it. Errata were previously relegated to an inconspicuous box on an interior page, printed a few days after the error was originally published (thus depriving all but the most attentive readers of the original item that they had been given incorrect information). Now the corrections section has made the transition to the digital age, and can now be found at the bottom of the homepage, stuck next to the phone number you call to complain that your paper keeps getting thrown into the ditch by the guy who delivers it. Ever since The Globe’s redesign, their “Corrections” hyperlink doesn’t even take you anywhere – it simply reloads the homepage. This isn’t to single out The Globe – The Toronto Star, Canada’s biggest newspaper by circulation, and The National Post, do precisely the same thing (well, at least they take you to a separate page with a list of corrections).

Here’s the thing: imagine one of our national papers prints a story that contains an error (let’s limit ourselves to clear factual errors, not differences of opinion as to what was expressed in an op-ed column). When apprised of the error, they need only issue a “correction” that languishes, exiled forever, on the “corrections” page of their website. Meanwhile, inexplicably, the original story remains on the website, uncorrected, an inviolate artefact. None of the newspapers even provide a notification or a link from the original story to the correction. Bad information is allowed to sit out there, undisturbed, as if we still lived in a world where all old newspapers did was collect dust in library archives.

The great innovation wrought by the internet is not to make for a more pleasing or information-rich experience; it is the opportunity for accountability. The interactivity and ethos of blogging is instructive: if you make a mistake in a post, before long you will be corrected either by a comment or a critical link from another blog – it is then incumbent on the original author to correct their mistake. Oddly, while newspapers have embraced the device of the blog (by hosting blogs written by their journalists) they seem yet to have embraced, or even understood, the ethical implications of a technology that permits, even encourages, horizontal editing.

Accurate facts are what the news media are supposed to trade in; when they get their facts wrong, they are trading in damaged goods. Those damaged goods pollute the resource that is the metaphorical marketplace of ideas. That newspapers willfully refuse to take meaningful steps to correct mistakes is evidence that they do not take the public elements of their role terribly seriously.

Indulge me in a simple, inconspicuous, but telling, example: on February 1, 2009, The Toronto Star published an op-ed column which contained two obvious misstatements of fact, one a statement indicating that Preston Manning had never been Leader of the Official Opposition (he was, from 1997 to 2000) and the second a statement that the Canadian Parliament had passed a resolution describing “Quebec” as a nation (the resolution actually described “the Quebecois” as a nation, a significant terminological difference). In an attempt to be helpful, an email was sent to The Star’s “Public Editor," who is responsible for attending to corrections. As of the time of writing of this article, nearly four months later, the original February 1, 2009 article has not been corrected on The Star’s website, no correction has ever been published by The Star, nor has any response from the Public Editor ever been received. One is forced to the conclusion that either The Star does not care to correct its mistakes or the Public Editor is so swamped with such misstatements that he or she has not had time to get around to it. Neither option reflects particularly well on them. And that example illustrates only a mistake of negligible importance. More seriously, The Star was obliged to “correct” a story that asserted that the Ontario government only funded four out of 69 parenting and literacy centres operated by the Peel Region public school board; that sounds bad – in point of fact, however, the Peel public school board operates only four such centres and receives full funding for all of them. Earlier in May, The Star “corrected” a report that stated 1,700 wind turbines currently operate in Europe; the actual number is closer to 74,000. Simple errors, but they greatly impact the story being told.

News media has one overriding goal: the provision of accurate, timely information. That's the “news” portion of the phrase; regrettably, they seem much of the time to be rather enthralled with the “media” aspect – you can't get an accurate story, but you can now stream a video of the reporter talking about it. It's progress, of a sort, but the wrong kind. It’s not that the news media can’t meaningfully offer corrections (the technology obviously exists), it’s that they refuse to do so. And they refuse to do so because they remain committed to an unaccountable model – the printed page, top-down, one-to-many paradigm, which, while it might have been tolerated previously, is no longer feasible. Every time a mistake goes uncorrected in a meaningful way, every time the simplest task using the most basic technology is ignored, another link in the chain of trust is eroded.

It might be objected that this is making much of very little; but that is precisely the point – if the news media cannot be bothered to take care of such a little (though not insignificant) matter as correcting factual errors they have made, it engenders doubt in the entire edifice of accurate, objective and accountable reporting. They can’t even be bothered to fix a mistake – instead, effort is being poured into the frivolity of “Web 2.0” add-ons. Put somewhat differently, the point is this: if media can’t be bothered to take their product seriously, why should the rest of us do so?