The Office of the Ombudsman has received an influx of emails claiming NPR falsely reported that the U.S. Chamber of Commerce has 3 million members in an Oct. 6 story.

But they are not correct.

In an All Things Considered story about Apple Inc. dropping out of the chamber, NPR reported that "The chamber still boasts some 3 million members -- and a powerful checkbook."

Soon after, emails began arriving and are still arriving.

"On Oct 6, NPR repeated the chamber's claim that they have 3 million members," wrote Steve Ozanne from Falcon Heights, MN. "The chamber has now admitted that they only have about 300,000 members. Please make sure in the future that you don't support their inflated claim of a much larger membership than they really have. An update would be nice, pointing out the inflated claim and the actual numbers."

This may be a case of semantics.

The U.S. Chamber says it represents 3 million businesses when it lobbies on Capitol Hill, according to J.P. Fielder, director of media relations.

The chamber counts about 300,000 local, metro and state chambers and trade organizations as direct members, said Fielder.

The emails we received largely were opposed to the Chamber's position against climate change legislation.

The Chamber's stance prompted a few big-name businesses to withdraw their membership. Apple Inc. was one. Because the Chamber spends millions of dollars lobbying on behalf of businesses, Apple Inc. pulling away from this organization is a news story.

NPR should have said the "U.S. Chamber of Commerce represents 3 million businesses." This would have alleviated any concern that either the Chamber or NPR was inflating membership numbers.

-- Caitlin Huey-Burns
Office of the Ombudsman, intern

This week the New York Times ran an 'Editors Note' correcting a Jan. 28 story about a support group for women having a tough time dating Wall Street bankers in a recession. The headline read, "It's the Economy, Girlfriend."

Only it turns out the support group didn't exist.

The site that earned the Times' attention is Dating a Banker Anonymous (DABA), and spells out tongue-in-cheek the financial pitfalls of women dating bankers during hard times. Interest in DABA went wild across the Internet -- much of it either incredulous or dismissive of the women who came across as whiners upset that they'd lost their Sugar Daddies. Quickly there was talk of a book or movie deal.

NPR blogger Linda Holmes spotted a fraud immediately. Holmes wrote a posting on her Monkey See blog expressing surprise that readers couldn't see how many things in the Times' piece didn't add up.

For one thing, Holmes (a former attorney) noticed that DABA was registered on Jan. 16 but had postings as far back as September 2008. She also found it odd that the Times said there were 30 women in the support group -- but there were no comments on the blog.

After Holmes and others challenged the veracity of the Times' piece, Newsweek met with the DABA women and got a confession.

"There is no real support community, no regular meetings and the blog is written by (Laney) Crowell and her lawyer sidekick Megan Petrus, who concoct entries out of a mixture of their own experiences, stories of people who email the site, and anecdotes of girls they meet socially," wrote Tony Dokoupil of Newsweek.

So I asked Holmes what can be learned from this.

"Skepticism is still really valuable," she said in an email. "Everybody who writes or edits stories about the Internet should know how blogs work and what online communities look like. The fact that a trend piece is controversy-baiting and gets attention but isn't genuinely newsworthy doesn't mean it won't be newsworthy if it turns out to be false."

It's yet another lesson to remind everyone not to be fooled into thinking that what happens online can't be traced.

"To be frank, I think what would have served everyone really well here would have been an actual organic pride in the veracity of what you're publishing," said Holmes. "I think that would have helped the Times identify this problem during editing. I think it would have helped them respond MUCH better the first time, and I think it would have helped them write a much better "Editor's Note" now.

"This was not a hard scam to identify. Our original blog post didn't constitute a full-blown investigation; just a basic application of Internet literacy and skepticism.

"I honestly don't care about the women who write the blog; what particular brand of opportunists they are is not really of any interest to me. But the way this story managed to get into the New York Times continues to bother me, as does their failure to fully acknowledge that the entire thrust of their story was fundamentally false -- not "wrong choice of words; we should have said 'satire' instead of 'support group,'" but actually false.

"And perhaps, though now I am sort of waxing philosophical, one of the most important lessons is that if you're trying to write about something as serious and important as the recession and how it affects real people, you don't give that much prominent space in the paper to a story that comes down to "You know what always gets people talking? Really, really hateful women.'"

New York Times Editors' Note: February 25, 2009
An article on Jan. 28 about women who commiserated over dating Wall Street bankers caught in the financial crisis described a group they had formed, Dating a Banker Anonymous, as a support group. That is the name of their blog. Its creators originally told The Times that about 30 women had participated, but since publication, they have said that all involved were friends. Laney Crowell, one of the women who started the blog, said in the article that it was "very tongue in cheek;" she has since described it as a satire that embellishes true experiences for effect. Had the nature of the blog been made clear at the outset, the article would have described it accordingly, not as a support group.

When a listener heard an NPR story that her condo building had signed a deal to rent out a wall for a billboard to pay for maintenance needs, she was shocked.

The story used Marcia Cohen-Zakai's Miami condo as an example of how the rise in condo foreclosures can trigger a rise in monthly fees for condo neighbors which in turn can fuel more foreclosures. At the time of the May story, 40 percent of her condo residents were behind in fees.

At the end of the six-minute piece, NPR correspondent Greg Allen said, "And to help cover the shortfall, the owners of these luxury condos are doing something that just a few years ago, they wouldn't have considered. They've signed a deal to rent out one side of their building as space for a billboard."

Cohen-Zakai has been an owner for five years. She rarely misses a meeting because what the condo board does affects her home. She knew she hadn't signed any such deal.

Continue reading "NPR Rescues Its Missing Corrections Policy" >

Jason Carlson was driving home listening to All Things Considered (ATC) on March 24 when he heard a gay man say he would not vote for Sen. Barack Obama because the senator's pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, was anti-gay.

That didn't gibe with what Carlson, an Evanston, Ill. high school science teacher, knew about Wright. Later, Carlson did a quick Internet search using "Wright" and "anti-gay," and discovered that what he had heard on NPR was, in fact, wrong. In a piece edited before broadcast, ATC had put something on air without checking to make sure it was correct.

Continue reading "IS OBAMA'S PASTOR ANTI-GAY? " >